Master of the Tomb Raider
by thewriterman91
Summary: When the Japanese Ministry of Magic learns of Harry Potter's specialty, they call him in to take care of a problem that's been in their backyard for almost five thousand years. In the process of getting to Yamatai, Lara Croft is dragged into a world of magic, adventure, and more than a little horror. Pairings TBD.
1. An Irresistible Offer

**So, this is the first story I've published in a long time. I recently acquired an Xbox One, and then got the Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition on a whim. I haven't regretted it at all. I've played through the game at least five times now, and while I was reading through Steelbadger's _Harry Potter and the Sun Queen_ , I was inspired to put my own twist on it.**

 **I have a lot already written, however, I've broken it down into more manageable chunks for purposes of posting, and even though I'm not done with the story yet, I've already got a sequel percolating in the back of my head. This is the first crossover I've ever done, and my knowledge of Lara Croft stems almost exclusively from the 2013 reboot, and 2015's Rise of the Tomb Raider, and a little bit of trivia here and there from the video games that came before it.**

 **I have, of course, taken some creative license with various things, but I'd like to think that I meshed it well enough for your suspense of disbelief. I plan on slow updates, mostly just so I can stay well ahead in my writing, but if I see a good enough following, I may be persuaded to post sooner than once a month.**

 **Now, please enjoy my story, the Master of the Tomb Raider.**

* * *

"Mr. Roth?"

Conrad Roth looked up from the German lager he was swirling around the bottle, and met the piercing green eyes of a young man with completely untamed hair.

"Who's asking?" Conrad questioned, eyes squinted in suspicion at the man who obviously knew who he was.

The young man slid into the booth across from him, surreptitiously waving his hand in a circle, and the thumping music and screaming of bar patrons muted down to far more bearable levels.

"Harry Potter, Boy-Who-Lived, Man-Who-Conquered, Man-of-too-goddamn-many-bloody-hyphenated-titles," the now named Harry Potter sighed out, brow pinching in annoyance. "It's about fifteen years too late, but your sister Ariella Roth was killed by magical terrorists during the resurgence of the Dark Lord Voldemort from the year of '95 to '98. I'm sorry for your loss."

Roth's jaw tensed as he stared at this man who had so nonchalantly spoken of his sister's death.

"For what it's worth, I killed the bastard who ordered her death. And the bastards who did her in are all dead too. She went out fighting to protect children from being slaughtered themselves. She managed to hold the dark bastards off long enough for the children to escape, and would've escaped herself if one of the bastards hadn't gotten a lucky shot in on her."

Harry pulled a flask from somewhere, Roth didn't see, vision occluded by silent tears. But he did see Harry raise the flask, and hear him say, "To Ariella Roth, the woman who saved three dozen children from death."

Roth clinked his bottle against the metal flask, before slugging back a hard swallow of his lager.

For the next hour, Conrad listened to Harry explain the series of tragedies that had befallen Magical Britain, and the culmination of everything on May second, nineteen ninety eight. Conrad refused the offer to see the memorial erected for all the people that had fallen during Voldemort's second rise.

"I'd rather remember her as she was, not as she is." Conrad stated, before drawing himself up a bit more. "But I'm sure that's not what you're actually here for. Someone of your stature wouldn't take up your time coming to visit an old, crusty bastard like me. So, why _are_ you here?"

"I've been commissioned by the Japanese Ministry of Magic to clear up a problem that's been sitting in their backyard for almost five thousand years." Harry explained. "Perhaps you've heard of the Dragon's Triangle, south of Japan? Makes the Bermuda Triangle look like a pleasant afternoon in a picturesque park?"

"Aye, I've heard of it. Why?"

"What do you know of phylacteries?"

Conrad stiffened.

"Quite a bit then," Harry said, eyeing Roth carefully. "Long story short, an ancient witch figured out how to make a ritual that allowed her to transfer her soul to another living being, thereby making the host person into a phylactery. Once the host crept into old age, which happened quite a bit faster than normal, a new host was chosen, groomed, and then transferred into. Rinse and repeat for about a thousand years, and suddenly, the Magical Kingdom of Yamatai goes silent, the island disappears from all maps, and the Dragon's Triangle comes into being. There are conflicting reports, but there are a few things that all reports agree on. The witch was made queen of the island of Yamatai, a nation independent of the Ancient Magical Japanese Empire, that her name was Himiko, and that she gathered enough magicals to her to control the weather around her island. By personal extrapolation, I've figured out that she eventually just ripped the magic from the other magicals, and added their power to her own. Anybody that can match your own power, is a threat, in the minds of all dark lords and ladies. By the way, ripping magic away from a magical, results in that person's death."

"You think Himiko is still there." Roth said.

"I _know_ that she's still there." Harry said, pulling a tiny black stone out of the ring he wore. "Bloody Stone won't leave me alone. Long story short, this stone was turned into a magical artifact by Death himself about a thousand years ago or so, now. It allows the user to bring back a shade of a deceased person, if the user knows the name of the person they wish to summon. Or their title. Doesn't matter which. When I use it, I get no shade. Which means, either she's alive on that island, trapped by her own magic, which I doubt, or her latest host pulled a fast one on Himiko, and she's now trapped in a body somewhere between life and death. I'm betting on the latter."

"Why tell me?" Roth asked, pushing his lager aside to lean in closer.

"I need to get on that island." Harry said, leaning in himself. "Magical transport gets bounced off, flying carpets and brooms get knocked out of the air, and the storms come out of nowhere to wreck any planes or ships that tries to leave, if they get there in one piece, that is. Magical Japan's been trying everything they could think of for the last few centuries, to no avail."

"You want to hire me, and my ship, to go to an island I won't be able to get off of, that will probably _wreck_ my ship getting there. Is that what you're saying?" Roth bit out.

"Mr. Roth, I've personally broken _into_ , and _out of_ Gringotts bank here in Diagon Alley. I have survived going up against dragons, nundus, a basilisk, spiders big enough to make a civilian lorry look kind of small, giants, soul sucking demons, a sphinx, a creature that takes on the form of your worst fear, werewolves, vampires, half harpy women that throw fire around like it's going out of style, trolls, and a menagerie of other things _guaranteed_ to bloody kill me, and I've walked away with less than half a dozen scars to show for it all. And, gotten everyone with me, out of it with minimal injury."

"Still doesn't do anything if my ship gets wrecked." Roth said sharply.

"If anything happens to your ship, I'll replace it with anything you want under fifty million pounds. After all, that's what the Japanese Ministry of Magic is paying me for this job." Harry waved off the sputtering ship captain. "Trust me, I don't need the money. I make plenty as it is."

"You're one of those bloody purebloods aren't you." Roth finally growled. He was taken aback by the frown Harry threw him.

"No." He sighed. "I'm a halfblood. My mother was a muggleborn, like your sister. But, yes, my father was a pureblood, of one of the oldest Houses in Europe. I grew up living with my muggle relatives, who hated magic, and grew up believing I was a poor little orphan, born of a pair of addicts who died in a car crash, up until my entrance into the magical world, where I found out I was bloody rich. Never liked showing it off, and I've made some serious investments in the muggle world, who would've though Apple would've taken off so suddenly, so I think I'm fine for now, as far as money goes. I'm offering ten million pounds now, and ten million pounds upon return, to be used at your discretion for ship, crew, and equipment. Any non-magical artifacts, if found on Yamatai, are yours, while any magical artifacts are mine.

"Make sure to select a crew you trust to be discreet about the concept of magic being real." Harry said, sliding a check and an address card across the table to Roth. "If you're unable to contract such a crew, contact me at this number, and I will negotiate with Gringotts for squibs and muggleborn witches and wizards who are comfortable working with muggle machinery."

With that, Harry waved his hand, and the music crashed back into Roth's unprepared ears as Harry got up.

"I never agreed!" Roth shouted over the music.

"Do you want the twenty million pounds and a new ship or not?!" Harry shouted back.

"… Damn me for a fool!" Roth shouted, before sticking his hand out. "You got yourself a deal!"

"Good man!" Harry said, shaking Roth's hand. "By the way, I believe Ms. Croft needs a thesis subject! And her roommate needs a documentary of some sort for her own graduation! Ms. Nishimura's status as a descendant of one of Himiko's hosts should provide us a shield against the worst of Himiko's wrath!"

And with that, Harry turned and disappeared into the crowd.

Roth stared after him, before looking down at the check filled out to him for ten million pounds, and then at his bottle of German lager.

"Sure don't feel drunk." He muttered, pocketing the check, before looking at the simple, off-white address card.

Harry Potter

Department of Mysteries

Office of Soul Affairs

British Ministry of Magic

Office: 1-800-126-2442 Ext: 7685

"On second thought, I'm going to go home and get drunk." Roth said, calling for his tab, before going outside and hailing a taxi.

"… How's he know about Lara?" Roth asked himself, once he was ensconced in his small apartment, nursing a locally made beer. "… I'm too sober for this magic shite."

* * *

 **And how do you like it?! Please, if you are a good beta reader, and saw any mistakes, please PM so that we can talk! I need a beta badly. And maybe a place where I can bounce ideas out of my head.**

 **Til next time!**


	2. Ch 2 Gathering

"Saaaaaammm…!" I groaned, before wincing as my own voice drove a dagger deeper into my skull.

"Whooo, that was an _awesome_ bender last night!" My best (possibly _only_ ) friend and roommate whooped loudly from _five bloody feet away!_ "We need to do that again! It was so much fun!"

"Sam, I need water and aspirin." I commanded, just loudly enough for my friend to hear, before burying my head back in my pillow.

A moment later, there was a rattle and a clank as a glass of water and the bottle of aspirin was placed on my bedside table, and I slowly sat up and cracked a single eye long enough to get out five pills, and grab the glass of water before closing it again, and popping the pills and drinking the water by touch alone.

"Jeez, Lara, it wasn't _that_ bad." Sam said as I sighed and laid back down, waiting for the pain reliever to kick in.

"… I don't remember much after that fifth martini…" I admitted quietly.

"… I got you blackout drunk?" she questioned. Then, "I got you blackout _drunk_!"

I brought a hand to my forehead in an effort to quell the rising nausea, trying to keep the pills down.

"Sam, I'm about to throw up if you don't _shut up_ , and if I do, I'm going to make _bloody_ sure as hell it's all over _you_." I hissed venomously.

I smirked as I heard retreating footsteps, and then sighed in relief as blessed quiet returned to the room. How Sam never had a hangover, I had no idea, but her insistence that we got out every other weekend to get roaring drunk ensured that I had a constant supply of aspirin to combat the numerous hangovers I'd come to sport in the last three years. Turning over to bury my face in my pillow once again, I slipped into that strange half awake, half asleep state where no time seemed to pass, yet an eternity seemed to wait. When I got up at two in the afternoon though, I was met by a surprise in the common room of mine and Sam's little college apartment.

"Roth!" I exclaimed, running to give him a tight hug, smile on my face.

"Lara!" he said, also smiling on that rough, craggy visage of his, and he picked me up with ease as he returned my hug. "Sam tells me she got you blacked out last night."

I glowered at my friend, who gave me her nearly trademarked sheepish but unapologetic smile in return.

"Yes, she did." I said, crossing my arms, only just noticing that I was still in the slinky black dress Sam had wrestled me into last night, and that I still stank of sweat and alcohol. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to shower and change."

"Good." Roth nodded. "You 'bout knocked me over by stench alone, lass."

I stuck my tongue out at him good naturedly, while Sam went and sat in the chair, and motioned to the couch for Roth, while I headed for my room, and then the loo.

When I finished and returned to the common, I heard Roth finishing telling the story of how I ran up to him in my penguin pajamas when I was five years old after finding the pendant I now wear around my neck.

"Alright, that's enough out of you, old man." I said, shoving him playfully. "Now what are you here for, really?"

I frowned when the smile slid off his face, adopting the serious mien I'd come to know as a little girl.

"I got my big payday, girly." He said, and I blinked as his attitude didn't reflect what I'd expect him to be expressing at finally catching the big payday that would allow him to retire and sail the seas until he died.

"Then why don't you sound happy?" I asked.

"I was hired by a government spook who was hired by Japan to investigate somethin' in their backyard. Guy specializes in it, see? Gave me ten million pounds for crew, equipment, and ship, is going to give me another ten on the return to port, and promises me a new boat with a price tag up to fifty million pounds. I took the job, obviously, but it's what he said before he left that has me worried."

"What'd he say?" I asked wondering what had a retired Royal Marine upset and cautious.

"Said he knew you were in need of a graduation thesis, and that Sam needed to film a documentary for her own graduation, and pretty much ordered me to invite you two on this trip." Roth said, and Sam and I exchanged glances.

"Then we won't go." I shrugged, not very concerned.

"No." Roth said. "You'll come with me. I've already vetted my crew, and all my people only work for me. He'll be coming with us, but if I leave you two here, he may send some of his people after you two. I'd rather have you both where I can keep an eye on you, with only one of him, than leave you here to fend for yourselves.

Sam and I were silent as we tried to digest that.

"You're saying he has that much power?" I eventually asked, uncomfortable with the thought of going with a man who was already interested in me when I didn't even know who he was.

"I'm sayin' I've done my research on him, limited though it is, and know that he can ask anyone in government to do something for him, and they'll throw money, men, and influence away in a heartbeat trying to please him." Roth said, rubbing his face. "The man's saved a _lot_ of people over the years Lara, and prevents the worst of the worst from rising to the top, and repeating what he saved people from years ago."

"So, is he a good government guy, or a bad government guy?" Sam asked.

Sometimes I wished my worldview was as simple as hers.

"All government people are bad, Sam." Roth said, giving my roommate the gimlet eye. "However, I think this guy is actually trying to do his job for the right reasons, which is close enough to good as we can get with all the political red-tape bullshit involved nowadays.

"Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, right?" I interjected, getting a nod from my father-figure. "So, when do we leave, where are we going, and what should I pack?"

Sam squealed and shot off to her room, probably to get a video camera, and Roth and I rolled our eyes. When she got back, and signaled us that she was recording, Roth spoke.

"We leave in a week, and we'll probably be gone for six months, or more," he said. "We're going to the Dragon's Triangle, just south of Japan. Apparently, the government branch in Japan that has the same function as my client's branch, is out of their depth, and called him in. We're going to Yamatai."

There was a clatter off to the side, and it took me a moment to realize that Sam had dropped her camera.

"You mean it's _real_?!" she squeaked.

"Apparently." Roth said. "And it's been giving the Japanese government trouble for almost five thousand years now. This guy's a problem solver. One of his contacts recommended me to him, he found me, hired me."

"What do I pack?!" Sam exclaimed, doing a little dance in place before picking up her camera.

"Pack for survival." Roth's statement dampened Sam's mood, as she frowned at him behind the view finder. "He said that, knowing his luck, there's going to be someone or something there doing its level best to kill him, and by extension, us. Tomorrow, I'm taking you two out to buy handguns and ammo. You're going to be armed at all times, even if it's only a knife. I'll teach you how to hide that shite. My gut's tellin' me that I need to be on alert at all times on this trip. It's best you be on full alert as well."

I nodded, and moved to put on the rugged hiking boots Sam had gotten for me.

"What kind of pistols do you have again, Roth?"


	3. Ch 3 A Rather Magical Crew

**So, I had fun with this chapter. There's some world building, and a couple of curve balls that I think easily fit into the narratives of both stories, but I'll let you all tell me what you think.**

* * *

I have to admit, after the initial shock of it all, I was excited! Yamatai!

Ever since Sam told me the story about her ancestor, the Sun Queen, Himiko, I had been fascinated by the thought of discovering a hidden kingdom, much like the much vaunted Atlantis, really. Only, Yamatai was real!

It was real… and the truth of it had been hidden for almost five thousand years.

A cold feeling of dread had been coiling in my stomach ever since Roth had taken me to get a matched pair of Remington 1911 .45's for this expedition. Sam had gone more conservative, only getting a .38 Smith and Wesson, but Roth had bought enough ammo for us both to supply an entire platoon.

"I've got money to blow on this now, girly." Roth had told me. "I'm not taking any chances.

After pulling all my research on Yamatai together, I'd worked backward from the assumption that Yamatai was an island in the Dragon's Triangle, and everything seemed to… click, together. Cliffhangers and loose ends suddenly tied together, conflicting points of view suddenly melded together, and it was suddenly _horrendously obvious_ to me, that I'd completely missed _everything_ of importance in my research over the last two years.

Sam had been forced to take away my thesaurus before I gave myself a gigantic bruise on my forehead, or a concussion, because I'd been using it to beat my forehead for my stupidity.

"Permission to come aboard, captain?"

I turned from the list of supplies Roth was having me inventory, and looked over the side to see probably the most breathtaking man I'd ever seen.

Long, unruly black hair waving in the wind, and piercing green eyes that bored into the soul were his most noticeable traits, but I felt a blush coming on when I realized that he wasn't that much taller than me, but it didn't seem to matter, because that shirt he was wearing was certainly showing off the hard-packed muscle of his upper body, which was more like a runner's build than a body-builder's.

"Permission granted, Mr. Potter." Roth called back from somewhere behind me.

I blinked. _This_ is the government spook who hired us?! He couldn't have been much older than me, if at all! My blush resumed when I watched him… _prowl_ … up the gangway. That was the only way to describe it, he _prowled_. All smooth movement and shifting muscles, and ohmygodhe'scomingmyway!

"I'm glad you followed my suggestion." Mr. Potter said, looking over my shoulder, where I could suddenly feel Roth looming over.

"Didn't exactly leave me much choice, now did you?" Roth shot back and I could easily detect the kernel of disgruntlement from my father figure.

"There is always a choice." Mr. Potter said, voice suddenly very grave. "A choice between what is right, and what is easy. Pray you always make the right choice."

"I think you've read too many fortune cookies."

"Sam!" I exclaimed, whirling to chew out my friend, only to pause when a full belly laugh erupted from the man who hired us.

"That's precisely what I said to my hundred fifteen year old mentor about twenty years ago, to which he asked, 'What, pray tell, Harry, is a fortune cookie?'!" Mr. Potter laughed, and I felt a swell of disappointment as I realized that Mr. Potter must have been much older than he looked.

"Twenty years ago?" Roth asked. "How old were you, six months?"

"I was thirteen, twenty years ago." Mr. Potter replied, and I felt my still glimmering hope die out with a sigh and a whimper. "Now, Mr. Roth, would you be so kind as to introduce me to these two lovely ladies, and then the rest of the crew?"

"Right." Roth said. "Lara, this is Mr. Harry Potter, our beneficiary for this trip. Mr. Potter, this is Lara Croft, the closest thing to a daughter I have."

"Nice to meet you, Ms. Croft." Mr. Potter said, extending a hand towards me. I took it, and suppressed a wince when I got a static shock from it, while Mr. Potter raised an eyebrow.

"Please, call me Lara," I said. "I've never really been one for formality."

"Only if you call me Harry." Mr. Potter – Harry – said. "In school, one of my most vocal detractors only ever addressed me with my surname. I rather like being called by my first name instead."

"I think I can do that." I smiled, realizing that I'd been holding his hand a rather long time now. I let it go, and he turned to Sam.

"And this, Mr. Potter, is Samantha Nishimura." Roth said, and I felt him eyeing me in a way I couldn't quite identify. "Sam, this is Mr. Potter."

"Pleasure to meet you." Harry said, and I watched Sam jerk a little.

"Ow!" she hissed. "I hate static electricity!"

"Yes, I seem to be rather attractive to the stuff today." Harry said, and I only just caught the joke before I opened my mouth and said something horribly embarrassing.

"Sorry." Sam shrugged, taking her hand back from Harry's. "Hey, so how do you manage to look so young if you're already thirty three?"

"Sam!" I exclaimed, mortified. Harry laughed and waved it off.

"Good genes." He chuckled. "A good portion of my family's been killed off in the last century or so, but the last death of natural, old age, was at one hundred and forty seven, died in nineteen fifty six. My father was born naturally in nineteen sixty one to a sixty three year old mother, and sixty five year old father, both of whom could've passed for my current age, maybe a little older."

I couldn't help but let my jaw hang slack. Those numbers were ridiculous!

"How'd you get such good genes?!" Sam exploded. "I mean, you're hot, you're wealthy, you're smart, obviously, and you're going to live for, like, ever!"

I would've chastised her, but my mind was filled with the same questions.

"Magic." Harry said, and then winked at us.

"Alright, that's enough." Roth cut in. "We still have the rest of the crew to introduce you to, Mr. Potter."

"That's right." Harry said, turning away from me and Sam before turning back to us. "Oh, by the way, I expect you two in the senior officer's meeting in an hour, wherever Mr. Roth here decides that will be."

"… The galley, then." Roth grudgingly agrees. "I'm sure Jonah will be glad to feed you girls, saying you're too skinny."

"I like my svelte figure, thank you very much." Sam stuck her tongue out at Roth, while I simply rolled my eyes.

Roth and Harry laughed as they walked away. Once they were out of earshot, Sam pulled me around to look at her.

"He's so fucking hot!" she whisper shouted.

"I know!" I clapped a hand over my mouth, horrified by my slip up, and feeling a sinking feeling of even worse horror as Sam's eyes took on a glint I knew would be followed by merciless teasing.

' _Is it possible to_ actually _die of embarrassment?'_ I thought, even as Sam was running me through the verbal wringer. _'Because Sam seems determined to get me to.'_

* * *

"We have a problem."

Roth side-eyed his client.

"And what would that problem be?"

"You have three magicals on this ship."

Roth stopped, and pulled Harry into a convenient storage closet, closing it most of the way after checking the hallway.

"Do you know who?" Roth asked, after a moment's contemplation.

"You just introduced me to two of them back there." Harry said. "Judging by Ms. Nishimura's accent, she should've attended the American school of Ilvermorny. She doesn't know."

"And Lara?" Roth questioned, incredulous at the idea of his nearly-adoptive-daughter being anything like his sister. "I can't remember her ever displaying accidental magic like Ariella."

"Was Lara a difficult birth, do you know?" Harry asked.

Roth blinked. "… Yeah, now you mention it, ole Richard Croft mentioned a few times how he wasn't sure Lara and her mother, Amelia, would make it through birth. But they both pulled through, and Lara's been pretty healthy her whole life. A bit stronger and faster than she looks to be, but she's pretty good about working out."

Harry shook his head.

"She has survival based magic." Harry said. "From the sounds of it, her life was on the line from the get-go. If she's anything like me, her magic internalized itself to preserve her. Magic is tied intimately to the natural survival instinct, and one of the first things it'll do is strengthen the body, and make it faster as well. After that comes the senses augmentation. I used to have to wear glasses, but once the augmentation kicked in, I've had 20/5 vision ever since. A little consciously channeled magic, and I can get even better vision, not unlike a rifle scope. Has Lara ever had an eye for details, above and beyond trained people?"

"Yeah, she has." Roth's eyes narrowed as he remembered Lara spotting climbing holds that he hadn't despite his decades of experience on her.

"Does she seem to have a natural immunity to most medicines, yet heals at a nearly supernatural rate?"

"Yeah." Roth said. "Ever since she was a little girl, the doctors realized they had to quintuple the dosage for any medicine they gave her, she just burned through it otherwise. Everyone blamed her metabolism breaking it down before it could do anything, though. She's always able to eat pounds of those Jaffa Cakes she loves so much, and it never seems to affect her weight, 'far as I can tell."

Harry nodded. "While magic itself doesn't burn calories, channeling it does put a minor stress on the body, resulting in heightened metabolisms. Survival magic induces comparatively more stress for the body, meaning we need to eat more than other people, simply because our bodies are forever channeling magic. According to the family records on my father's side, I should've topped out around two inches taller than you, but because of my survival magic, my body stopped growing at five foot nine, and started compressing all the muscle that I gained after that. I'm guessing Lara's rather short, compared to her parents?"

Roth nodded, remembering Richard's rather impressive six foot four height, and Amelia's statuesque five foot ten.

"Lara's only five foot six." Roth commented absently. "She was rather put out that she wasn't taller."

"Yes, my best friend is damn near seven feet and an easy three hundred pounds, and not a bit of flab on him." Harry hummed. Roth whistled.

"And what about Sam?" Roth asked.

"I think she's a descendent of Himiko's original body." Harry mused. "Judging by how strong Sam is, Himiko must've been a nightmare in battle. Even before she probably absorbed all those other magicals' power. Sam, with the proper training, could be an incredibly powerful witch. Probably the most powerful since Morgana, assuming Morgana still outstripped Himiko in power, even after magic siphoning."

"And where do you fall in this magical power order?" Roth asked, an eyebrow raised.

"More powerful than Merlin, who is most certainly more powerful than Himiko ever dreamed of being." Harry shrugged off Roth's incredulous look. "In all honesty, Lara has the potential to be just as, if not even more powerful than, Sam."

"So, who's the third magical on board?" Roth asked after a moment.

"I'll let you know when I meet him." Harry said, before stepping out into the hallway, and then following Roth around the _Endurance_ as he was introduced to the crew, seeming to find great pleasure in Grim's rather fatalistic humor, and throwing money at Alex to go get himself a top-of-the-line laptop and computer equipment for the ship.

"Ms. Reyes?!" Harry exclaimed, after coming to the engine room. Roth stopped in his tracks, immensely surprised that his client already knew his on-again-off-again lover.

"Do I know you?" Reyes asked suspiciously.

"I should hope you remember me." Harry said, putting on a pair of glasses. "After all, I returned your daughter to you when she got lost in Diagon Alley on your first visit for school shopping."

Reyes and Roth blinked, before recognition and elation covered Reyes' features.

"There we go." Harry said, taking off his glasses

"Wait, Reyes, your daughter goes to Hogwarts?" Roth finally choked out.

"How do you know about Hogwarts?" Reyes shot back.

"My sister was a witch." Roth explained. "I was jealous that I didn't get to go, but I never had any accidental magic to speak of."

"Eh, it's not so much accidental magic that gives it away." Harry said, drawing their attention to him. "Hogwarts has a magical registry that records all magical births. Young Ms. Reyes was simply born within Hogwarts' scrying wards, and her name was entered into the registry."

"In that case, why wasn't Lara invited to Hogwarts, since you seem determined that she's also a witch?" Roth asked, drawing a surprised look from Reyes.

"From mid-summer of '96 to mid-summer of '98, Voldemort's followers were tasked with destroying the invitations and records of muggleborn witches and wizards." Harry explained. "As a result, anyone born before '99 had their records erased. Hogwarts was actually shut down for a few years, technically speaking, simply because nearly an entire generation of witches and wizards never got their invitations."

"It was that bad?" Reyes asked.

"Voldemort's end-goal, if he'd been successful, would've made Hitler look like a little two year old having a minor tantrum." Harry said. "Anyways, I believe, the last person on this ship is our mysterious third magical signature, Mr. Roth."

Roth blinked before frowning.

"But that'd be Jonah Maiava, my cook."

"I'm assuming he's Pacific Islander of some kind?" Harry questioned. At Roth's nod, he smiled. "Those people always had interesting foci for their magic. Tattoos made with the blood of kelpies and powdered grindylow bones. They generally specialize in healing magic and strength enhancing magic."

"Like yours?" Roth asked.

"No." Harry shook his head. "Mine is naturally guided by instinct and intuitively directed by my subconscious throughout my whole body. Pacific magic is targeted and consciously manipulated. Mine augments everything, including nervous system speed, while Pacific island magic targets only muscles and bones. They're not fast, but magic help you if you get in front of them when they've got a full head of steam."

"So… Lara and Sam are witches?" Reyes asked Roth quietly as they led the way to the galley.

"Apparently." Roth replied in kind. "Sam and Lara jumped like they'd been shocked when Mr. Potter here shook their hands. He says that only happens when an untrained, powerful magic user comes into contact with a trained magic user. I'm starting to get the impression that magic is just a wee bit sentient."

"Like a self-aware parasite." Reyes said scathingly.

"It got Lara to survive being born." Roth shot back, a bit heatedly. "Without magic, Lara wouldn't've survived bein' born, Amelia wouldn't've survived the birthing process, and Richard would've gone off the deep end."

Reyes was silent the rest of the way to the galley, where they met Jonah, and Sam and Lara were both enjoying some Jaffa cakes, while Grim regaled them with the tale of the time he gave the Loch Ness Monster a Glasgow Kiss.

"Hah!" Harry exclaimed, after hearing that. "Surprised Nessy didn't bite your head off for that. She rather dislikes non-magicals."

All activity in the galley came to a screeching halt as Jonah gave Harry a withering glare.

"And who're you?" Jonah asked suspiciously.

"Harry Potter, financier and client for this expedition of yours." Harry smiled, walking closer to Jonah and extending a hand.

Jonah blinked before a very contrite expression came over his face.

"I'm sorry Mr. Potter, I didn't realize who you were, and… well… the Statute…" Jonah trailed off.

"Hah!" Harry scoffed. "Roth's sister was a witch, Reyes' daughter is a witch, Sam and Lara are untrained witches, Grim here met Nessy while drunk and lived to tell of it, and you're a Pacific Islander mage. The only people unaware of magic's existence in this room are Sam and Lara, and in the latter case, that's mostly because of Voldemort's Second Rise. Oh, not you too."

Jonah had shuddered at the mention of Voldemort's name.

"Okay, what's going on?" Sam demanded. "Who's calling me a witch?"

"Magic isn't _real_." Lara stated angrily. "It's just a fiction made up by people in ancient times who didn't understand the laws of physics."

Harry spun to face the two girls with a delighted smile on his face, and with a gesture, sat in a chair that hadn't been there a second ago.

"Ah, but it is, Lara." Harry said. "That wasn't static electricity that bit you and Sam earlier. That was your untrained magic calling out to mine. Magic wants to be used, and the only reason why you had a lesser reaction to it is because you've already been using your magic your whole life."

"But magic isn't real!" Lara said desperately, trying to avoid staring at the chair that Harry was sitting on.

"Aye, lass." Grim drawled sarcastically. "Tha's why 'e's sittin' on a chair tha' doenae match anythin' on board, a chair that wa'nae there a minute ago. I's why your chair is hoverin' three inches off tha deck!"

Lara jerked around to look at the curmudgeonly old Scottsman, before leaning over her legs to see her chair was, indeed, hovering a couple inches off the deck, before it dropped with a clang, and a yelp from the girl in question.

There was a moment of silence.

"Well, if she's anything like Alisha, there'll be books floating around her head by the end of the day." Reyes said, one hand on her forehead.

"Lightin' things on fire, I reckon." Roth disagreed. "That temper o' hers is right _nasty_ when Lara's in a snit. An' I think we're about to see the snit to end all snits."

"Um, hello?" Sam interjected. "Who the hell is calling me a witch?!"

"I am, Sam." Harry said, turning to her with a smile. "Oh, and Alex, you can come in, since you seem to be so interested in the supernatural."

There was a moment of silence before Harry sighed, and crooked his finger at the door. Alex suddenly came screeching into the room, looking like somebody had lassoed him around the waist to pull him into the room, and with a wave of Harry's hand, the door to the galley clanged shut and the locking mechanism spun until the door was locked.

"Mr. Potter, the Statute…!" Jonah exclaimed.

"The Statute of Secrecy is a sack of shite that I've been playing fast and loose with for the last ten years." Harry waved off. "I've kept an eye on the numbers Obliviators spew out every six months in all the nations I've had to work in, and there's not been a single uptick in Obliviations anywhere. I'm a pretty good judge of character."

Jonah's shoulders slumped in defeat.

"Why do I feel like I just got pulled into an Illuminati meeting, and they're trying to decide on whether or not to kill me or induct me?" Alex asked, eyes flickering all over the room.

"They're trying to decide on whether or not to adjust your memories." Reyes deadpanned.

There was shocked silence from the four people not already in the know, before Sam spoke once again.

"Why am I a witch?" she asked, voice a little lost.

"Ah, the golden question." Harry said, rubbing his hands together excitedly. "Allow me to build the set."

Sam suddenly scrambled for the camera on the table next to her, and then signaled for Harry to continue as he watched her with bemusement.

Over the next couple of hours, he explained Grindlewald, Voldemort, the Death Eaters, Hogwarts, and most importantly, magic, giving numerous examples of such that eventually brought everyone who hadn't already been aware of it, around to the idea of magic being _very_ real. Of course, it took Harry transfiguring Lara into a housecat to get her to believe it, but, in the end, believe it she did.

"So, you're not going to erase my memories?" Alex finally asked, once silence had fallen following Harry's longwinded explanation.

"Nah." Harry scoffed. "When we get to Yamatai, you're going to encounter a lot of magical things that have no scientific explanation. Trying to go through your memories and adjust all of them would be a pain in the arse to do. Plus, I've been in need of someone to keep me up on modern technology, and if Roth has no protests, I'll be hiring you on permanently once this expedition is over."

"I… uh, I don't know what to say…" Alex wondered, eyes wide.

"Thank you is commonly accepted in these situations." Harry smirked as Alex repeated the words.

"So, how is everyone here able to be in the know about magic?" Sam asked, her camera still recording.

"Well, obviously, I'm a wizard." Harry said with a smile, leaning back in his chair. "Mr. Maiava over there is a Pacific Mage, and a bloody powerful one too, I reckon, judging by the fact that he's got his signature suppressed from what I can tell. Roth's sister was a witch, she died saving three dozen children from being slaughtered during Voldemort's second rise, and Ms. Reyes' daughter is a witch. And Grim is the first non-magical I've ever heard of to actually encounter Nessy while drunk, and live to tell of it. Nessy's the largest Kelpie in the world, and Kelpies rather enjoy human flesh, and drunk humans especially because they can get drunk off the flesh of a drunk person."

There was silence as everyone eyed Grim for a moment as he mimed headbutting Nessy, before Sam spoke up again.

"So, I ask again, how are Lara and I witches?" Sam asked.

"Far as I can tell, you're a descendent of Himiko's original body before she got all immortality happy and started transferring her soul into the most beautiful women on the island of Yamatai." Harry said, ignoring everyone's horrified expressions. "Judging by the shock you got when we shook hands, you're probably the most powerful witch since Morgana, which, if my calculations are right, means that Himiko's original body would've been a nightmare in battle, even before she probably ripped the magic out of her coven to be able to control the weather, killing the rest of her coven in the process."

"Okay, nevermind, not happy I'm related to a psycho bitch witch." Sam gulped.

"Don't worry, go back about a thousand years on my dad's side, and I'm related to Voldemort, so don't worry about it. You're not your family." Harry waved off.

"So, I must be pretty weak, since I didn't get much of a shock." Lara said, pursing her lips.

"Ah, au contraire, mes ami." Harry put on a nasally French accent. "I dare say you're on the level of Morgana herself, however, the reason why your shock was so much less than Sam's, is because of one simple reason: your magic is already heavily engaged."

Understanding dawned on Jonah's face as he glanced between Harry and Lara.

"You mean…?" he questioned.

"Indeed." Harry said. "Lara, your magic has been engaged since before you were born. You are intimately familiar with survival magic. If you're anything like me, your magic internalized itself to preserve you. Magic is tied intimately to the natural survival instinct, and one of the first things it'll do is strengthen the body, and make it faster as well. After that comes the senses augmentation. I used to have to wear glasses, but once the augmentation kicked in, I've had 20/5 vision ever since. A little consciously channeled magic, and I can get even better vision, not unlike a rifle scope."

There was silence as Lara stared at her hands in shock.

"… Well, that explains why she broke that one guy's femur a couple years ago when she kicked him for groping her." Sam offered.

"I don't suppose you were wearing steel toe boots?" Harry chuckled. At Lara's negative, he chuckled again. "Sounds about right."

Harry sighed, expression becoming serious.

"Sam, Lara, _do_ you want to learn how to use magic?" Harry asked. "Think carefully. Though magic is yours, and your birthright, there is far more to magic than waving a wand and saying seemingly nonsensical words. There is discipline, there is danger, and most horribly, there is homework of the written variety. Due to the fact that both of you are already adults, you will not be allowed to attend Hogwarts to receive your magical education. Instead, I am offering you both apprenticeships under myself, until such time as I declare you to be fully basically trained witches, competent in the arts of witchcraft.

"Should you accept, my word will be law. Your actions will reflect on myself, and as such, I will brook no disobedience. You have until sundown tonight to decide."

There was a squeal of metal on metal, and the door to the galley swung open, and Harry stood, his chair disappearing immediately.

"I'll be near the bow of the ship when you have your answers." He said, and walked out of the room, leaving silence in his wake.

"I might have to see about learning from him too." Jonah said, before moving to follow Harry.

"Well, if ah eve' 'ad reason t'stay 'way from drink, now ah 'ave more." Grim said, before shuffling off towards the wheelhouse.

Alex left without saying anything, and when Roth and Reyes were about to leave, Lara spoke.

"Stay, you two." She said quietly. "Please."

Roth and Reyes looked at each other, before settling back in their chairs.

"… Roth, what… what was your sister like? When she discovered she was a witch?" Lara finally asked.

"Well, now…" Roth blinked and leaned back in his seat. "I think she was relieved, most of all. Harry seems to think your survival magic limited your accidental magic, so you never experienced it, but Ariella had a few things happen to her growing up that made her a bit of an outcast. Accidentally turned a rather mean teacher's hair a fantastic shade of purple once. Accidentally vanished a bully's homework a few times. Nothing permanently injurious, though."

"Alisha was the same." Reyes cut in. "One day, I mentioned how I never liked cornrows because it made me look practically bald, and then later that same day, I had to discipline Alisha. Next morning, I woke up with my hair in the tightest cornrows my hairdresser ever saw. Took him four hours to undo it. Next time I had to discipline Alisha, my cornrows were yellow on top of that. After I figured out the correlation, I had to be more careful of how I disciplined her, since I was losing money like crazy getting my cornrows undone."

"What is… accidental magic, you called it?" Sam asked, pointing her camera at Roth and Reyes.

"Accidental magic is magic instinctively used by magical children in response to powerful emotions, but most commonly associated with the survival instinct in cases of perceived danger." Reyes responded. "One of Alisha's professors at Hogwarts is a contemporary of Harry's and Professor Longbottom tells the story, every year to the first years, of how, for the first several years of his life, his family thought him to be a squib, or a non-magical person born to magical parents. One of his great-uncles thought it a great idea to constantly scare the living shit out of him to try and get an expression of accidental magic, and decided dangling Professor Longbottom off the second story of the family manor was a good idea.

Reyes gave a bitter laugh. "Longbottom was suspended by a single ankle, upside down, and dropped when his relative was distracted by another."

Sam and Lara's eyes were wide, and their faces pale as they feared the worst.

"Professor Longbottom's accidental magic saved him, although in a slightly humorous manner, by making him bounce like a rubber ball, all the way down the garden path." Reyes snorted. "No injury."

"But as for how Ariella was… Well, she was happy." Roth sighed, staring into nothing. "She loved me, I was her favorite sibling, but the way her face lit up when she was ready to get on that old steam train to head to Hogwarts… Her mind may have been with me, with the family, but her heart belonged to the magical world. Heh, I dare say it was her first love."

"Alisha always gets so excited." Reyes smirked. "I have to take her to Diagon Alley so that she can get away with her underage magic every summer to allow her to show me what all she learned.

"Underage magic?" Sam questioned.

"Witches and wizards get their wands at age eleven, right before they go to Hogwarts." Reyes said. "However, there's a law that's supposed to apply to everyone that students under their majority, which in the magical world is seventeen, aren't allowed to perform spells outside of school. Of course, the purebloods, those raised already aware of magic because they come from a magical family, are the exceptions, something about their homes having so much ambient magic that the Ministry of Magic's sensor wards can't get a proper reading of who's casting a spell, so most pureblood children grow up doing magic with wands they inherit from someone else in the family.

"The law's obviously biased against muggleborns, magical children born to non-magical parents, since purebloods can get away with using magic outside of school if they're at home." Roth added. "However, any magical area, like, say, Hogsmeade, which is supposedly a small village near Hogwarts that the students can visit for R&R purposes, Diagon Alley, where there's so much ambient magic in the air that non-magical folk can feel it, or the Ministry itself, which I wouldn't recommend since the magical bobbies are based out of the same building apparently, the muggleborns can get away with using magic without tripping the wards of the Ministry."

"Would you say becoming Harry's apprentice is a good idea?" Lara asked.

Roth and Reyes looked at each other before Reyes spoke up.

"To be honest, Lara, apprenticing to Harry would be like apprenticing to… that one guy who discovered King Tut's tomb, what's his name?" Reyes asked.

"Howard Carter." Lara said, eyes brightening. "Ninety years ago, he discovered the tomb of Tutenkhamun's tomb! Is Harry that good with magic?"

Reyes shrugged. "Accounts vary. But one confirmed rumor I've heard, is that he managed to teach a first year student how to perform the Patronus Charm, something used to ward off creatures that can suck your soul out by giving you a kiss."

There was a pause as Lara and Sam tried to digest that horrifying piece of information.

"Supposedly, the Patronus Charm is so difficult, ninety eight percent of adults are unable to use it. And Harry mastered it at thirteen, and two years later, taught almost fifty of his fellow students, older and younger, how to cast the charm at the same level of proficiency as he was capable of. He single-handedly quintupled the number of people capable of casting that charm in a few months. In comparison, the rest of the population that is capable of using it, typically require _years_ to get the basic first result."

"But with that kind of fame, comes haters, detractors, and people trying to kill him."

"Imagine, for a moment, Lara, the idea of fellow archaeologists trying to discredit Howard Carter on a regular basis, simply because Carter discovered King Tut's tomb first?" Roth questioned, getting a horrified and shocked expression from Lara. "Imagine some lunatic getting it in his head that if he can discredit Carter, then he can have all the glory of being the _real_ man who discovered King Tut's tomb. Being Harry's apprentice will paint a _big_ fucking target on your back. You too, Sam. I'm not saying that you shouldn't be Harry's apprentices, you both need to be educated in your birthrights, but it wouldn't be a bad idea to extract a promise from Harry that he do his best to protect you two."

"Look, neither of us can make this decision for you." Reyes said, lips pursed as she looked at Lara and Sam with concern actually showing on her face. "But I think it would be to both of your benefit to learn magic from Harry. At the very least, if you decide you don't want to permanently join the magical society, you can use your abilities to help you in your careers."

The galley was silent for a moment as Sam and Lara obviously contemplated the danger that being Harry's apprentice might bring them.

"I have to do it." Lara finally said, pushing against her knees as she stood. "He's shattered my whole world view, and I'm going to hold him responsible for helping me craft a new one."

"I'll have the ice cream ready in four hours." Roth said with a chuckle, before getting up and moving off, Reyes chuckling as she followed his lead.

"… And you, Sam?" Lara asked, turning to look at her best friend, gently taking the camera from her hands, and pointing it at the half Japanese girl.

"… Sweetie… I don't really have a choice…" Sam shook her head. "If even half of what Harry suspects of Himiko is true… I have a responsibility to at least try and honor the people who she killed in a bid for power. Power that has probably killed thousands, maybe even millions, more people who have been stranded on that island! I may never know their names, but I _will_ honor them! How many lives were cut short, families shattered, because my ancestor was a power hungry bitch?!"

Sam finished with a scream, and the table and chairs in the galley were all flung into the walls with deafening crashes. Lara stared wide-eyed at her friend, blood running down her right arm from where the corner of the metal table had scratched her in its flight.

"And… that's enough of that." Harry said, stepping back into the galley, stopping by Lara to heal her arm in a few seconds, before moving on to Sam.

"Are you done?" Harry asked, arms folded as he looked down at Sam.

Sam was panting, and her face was blotchy with rage, and fear, and no small amount of surprise.

"Are you done?" Harry repeated, staring at Sam with his eyes seeming to glow.

"… Yes." Sam finally said.

"Well then, Ms. Nishimura, Ms. Croft." Harry said, moving until he was standing equidistant from the two girls. "Have you accepted my terms of apprenticeship?"

Lara and Sam both straightened, some strange instinct layering their voices with intent as they spoke as one.

"I, Lara Croft/Samantha Nishimura, do hereby accept the terms set forth by Lord Harold Potter for the position of apprentice. I will obey him. I will expect his protection from forces working against him through me, and I expect him to teach me everything he knows about magic."

" _So say I, so says Magic, so mote it be."_ The three chorused, Harry's eyes wide in both shock, and no small amount of horror as a blinding light emitted from the three of them.

Lara and Sam both dropped the floor, woozy and fuzzy-headed, while Harry merely groaned, putting a hand to his forehead.

"Just fucking great." Harry muttered. "I figured Murphy's Law, Harry Potter Addendum wouldn't kick in until I actually _got_ to Yamatai!"

He looked down at the two girls, before waving at them, who suddenly felt the fog lifting from their minds, and an odd sensation of being lifted to their feet while feeling no hands on their bodies.

While the two girls stared at Harry, he conjured a piece of paper which he then spoke to.

"Roth, I'm taking the girls and Jonah to get wands." Harry said, and though the girls couldn't see it, Harry watched the words write themselves on the paper. "I need to get the girls wands so they have a base to start with before getting into the advanced magics, and Jonah is interested in learning wanded magic. I expect to be gone for, at most, three hours. When we come back, we can leave at your leisure. Harry."

With that, the paper folded up, before vanishing without a trace.

Just then, Jonah came thundering into the galley.

"Whoa," he said, looking at the damaged walls and furniture. "Knew I felt a magic surge, but I didn't think that Sam would be able to do _this_."

"It's not that bad." Harry said, waving his hand, restoring the room to what it once looked like before Sam's small explosion. "Have you ever been to Diagon Alley, Jonah?"

"No." Jonah shook his head. "I didn't know about Roth or Reyes' magical relations, so I didn't ask them where the portal was, and British magicals are so reclusive that finding one would've been damn near impossible."

"Great…" Harry sighed out. "I rather dislike side-along apparating people, but I guess I've got no choice."

Jonah nodded before stepping closer to put his hand on Harry's shoulder.

"Girls, hold my hands please." Harry said, turning to look at the two.

Lara and Sam exchanged glances, before stepping closer as well, and slipping one hand into one of Harry's.

"Apparation is the name for magical teleportation." Harry explained. "Any magical can perform it, and it's rather like a muggle driver's license in that you have to have an apparation license to be legally allowed to apparate once you've achieved your majority. However, apparation has its risks. If one isn't focused enough, you may leave a body part behind, and though your magic will preserve you and your lost body part, the sooner you can get it reattached, the better. You must never attempt apparating until I deem you ready, and never, without my supervision. Do you understand?"

Lara and Sam nodded seriously, and waited for Harry to continue.

"Now, apparation feels rather like being squeezed through a toothpaste tube four sizes too small, and severe nausea is not uncommon with first timers, so don't feel bad if you throw up." Harry smirked at them, loving the nervous looks the girls were throwing each other. "Now, I'm going to disapparate us on three, so on two, take a deep breath and hold it, and close your eyes. Understand?"

Sam and Lara nodded again, and Harry began counting.

"One… two…" Sam and Lara sucked in a breath and squeezed their eyes shut. "Three."

And with a crack of displaced air, the quartet disappeared from the galley.


	4. Ch 4 Connecting Like to Like

**Well, here we are again. I must say, I rather enjoy reading the reviews you guys leave, but reviews are sort of like chocolate for me, and I'm a chocoholic, so I think you can draw an accurate conclusion from that.**

 **Now, I'm not sure if I've done it in any of my other chapters, I don't feel like checking, but Harry Potter and all affiliated people, places, things, and ideas belong to J.K. Rowling, and Lara Croft and all of her associated people, places, things, and ideas belong to Crystal Dynamics.**

 **That being said, let's get the show started!**

* * *

Apparating felt exactly like how Mr. Potter had explained. I felt like I was being pushed through a tube of toothpaste that was _far_ too small, and I felt my eyes being pushed back into my skull rather painfully, and my chest compressed in a way I didn't like, and it was everything I could do not to let out a scream.

Then it was over, and my feet were back on solid ground. I collapsed immediately and retched, splattering my hands with sick, and heard the same next to me, along with the distinctive coughing from Sam's throat.

"Little dramatic, don't you think?" I heard Mr. Potter say above me.

"Ignore him, Little Bird." Jonah said, one of his enormous hands resting on my back, rubbing soothing circles on my back. "Your reaction is not uncommon for first time apparators, and trust me when I say that side-along apparation is even worse. Once Mr. Potter teaches you how to apparate on your own, you'll be popping all over the place."

"If you start popping from one room to another, I'll erect anti-apparation wards on the ship and make you walk everywhere." Mr. Potter shot back.

It took a few moments for Sam and I to collect ourselves, by which time I'd heard quite a few people come up and greet Mr. Potter, and ask about me and Sam. His responses were non-answers that seemed to satisfy everyone, before Mr. Potter hauled me to my feet and began walking towards the back of the grungy pub I found us in. As we stepped through the back door to a seemingly enclosed back step, I wondered what Mr. Potter was doing.

"Watch carefully." He said, and I moved closer to the wall he was facing to see him raise what must have been his wand, and tap it on specific bricks in a certain order. I startled back a step when the bricks started folding back and formed an archway, through which I could see a fantastical alley, filled with stores I couldn't quite believe were standing upright without external support.

"Whoa." Sam said next to me. "Is everything so dirty in the magical world?"

Mr. Potter snorted. "You would think so wouldn't you? But no, most houses and important public places are clean. This place is protected by various magics, but everyone lets the outside of their shops and such get run down looking so that in the unlikely event that the magics fail, the muggles won't look further than the outside and think Diagon Alley isn't worth investigating."

"I guess that's smart." I shrugged. "So, where are we going?"

"To Ollivander's Wand Shop." Mr. Potter said, pointing at a store front.

"382 BC?!" I exclaimed, staring at the small, gold painted letter above the store. "This store has been around for almost two and a half _thousand_ years?!"

"Not the store." Mr. Potter said, and I relaxed a little. "The Ollivander family has simply been making and selling wands for that long. I'm sure their family genealogy can be tracked even farther back than that in their private family records."

I came to a stop in the middle of the street, trying to reconcile the fact that Mr. Potter had stated this so casually as to make it seem normal. In the normal, non-magical world, most people have trouble tracking back past the relatives their grandparents remember, so about a hundred fifty years. Really, only royalty and various nobles can go back farther than that, but once one's genealogy gets into the Dark Ages, accurate tracking of relatives becomes damn near impossible, even for royalty!

"I can see where our _next_ stop is going to be." Mr. Potter said, nudging me to move towards the store. "Come on now, we're on a tight schedule to make sure we get there and get our stuff before all the stores close."

I stumbled along, trying to understand how a family could track themselves back as far as Mr. Potter was implying, before stepping into the smell of a bookstore. Blinking, I looked up, and saw, instead of books, shelves upon shelves upon shelves of small boxes, filling up any and all available space. There was that smell of old, dusty books, a smell that reminded me of my childhood before my mother died, when she used to read me archaeology books in the manor library…

I shook my head to bring myself back to the present, only to jump as a gaunt faced older man slammed to a stop on a rolling ladder at the bookcase nearest us.

"Ms. Croft." He said, silver eyes wide, staring at me, and then Sam and Jonah as he spoke. "Ms. Nishimura, Mr. Maiava. I see that Mr. Potter has finally brought you three to me. It's about time."

"How _do_ you know the names of everyone that walks into your store, Mr. Ollivander?" Mr. Potter questioned behind me.

"Trade secret." The old man smiled benignly.

"Family secret, you mean." Mr. Potter shot back. "Anyways, I'm–"

"Headed to Yamatai." Mr. Ollivander said, cutting off my new teacher. "Yes… Yes, dangerous place that. I would recommend stealth and attack skills as the first order of business for your young charges, followed by those wonderful wards you, Mr. Weasley, and Ms. Granger used all those years ago."

"I'll keep that in mind, sir."

I noticed the tightness in Mr. Potter's voice, but didn't comment on it.

"Very well." Mr. Ollivander said. "Ms. Croft, step forward please."

I looked back at my teacher, who simply nodded, before bracing myself and stepping closer to the counter.

"Which is your casting arm?" Mr. Ollivander said, a cloth tape measure floating towards me, before beginning to measure me randomly.

"My what?" I asked.

"Which hand do you write with?" Jonah supplied.

"Oh," I said, startled. "I write with my left hand, but I shoot with my right, I have better distance vision in that eye."

"I see." The wandmaker, if that's what he really was, said. It was only then that I noticed the tape measure whipping about my body. I snatched it and threw it away when I realized it was measuring the distance in between my nipples. "We wandmakers have always had a touch of the Sight. However, we do not see what _will be_ , rather, we see what _could be_. Hence, why we make so _very many_ wands. Decisions can greatly change a person's future, Ms. Croft. Your decision to learn magic from Mr. Potter will lead you to greatness, of this, there is no doubt. However, your survival magic is so very similar to Mr. Potter's that the number of wands I can See choosing you are very few, as compared to Mr. Potter's numerous multitude of potential wands."

Throughout his speech, Ollivander had been flitting between shelves, long, slender fingers spidering their way around as they selected boxes, until about two dozen sat clutched in his arms as he made his way back to me at the counter.

"As Mr. Potter well knows, the wands chooses the wizard, or in your case, the witch."

"You make it sound like the wands are alive." Sam states. "Like they have their own minds."

"To us wandmakers, Ms. Nishimura, the line between having a mind of its own, and simply attaching like to like, has always been a _very_ thin line to tread." Ollivander said, voice suddenly very grave. "A wand is a reflection of its owner, either in part, or in whole. Treat your wand well, and ensure its continuous wellbeing, and it will channel your magic far better than if you treat it as a mere object, or tool."

"Try this one, Ms. Croft." The wandmaker said, holding a wand out to me. "Twelve inches, wormwood and unicorn hair. Rather swishy, and good for charms and jinxes."

I took it, and held it, unsure of what to do.

"Well, give it a wave." Mr. Potter said behind me, right as Ollivander opened his mouth to speak. I blinked, and did so, only to jump when some drawers full of paper shot out of their places and paper went flying everywhere.

"Well, that's not it." Ollivander said, snatching the wand out of my hand, only to shove another into it. "Eleven and a half inches, vinewood and dragon heartstring, durable, and good for curses and hexes."

I carefully pointed it away from anyone, and when I waved the wand, I got blown back onto my butt from a sudden surge of wind.

"Definitely not that one." Ollivander said, once again taking the wand from me, but before he could shove another into my hand, Mr. Potter spoke up, drawing my attention to him.

"Mr. Ollivander, I know you _do_ enjoy your tricky customers, but, if I might make a suggestion?" he said. At Ollivander's curious expression, he continued. "I do believe Ms. Croft and Ms. Nishimura would be quite near to matching with _those_ wands you recently made. We _are_ on a tight schedule right now."

The shop was silent, as the wandmaker and my teacher seemed to hold a silent conversation with their eyes.

"I see." Ollivander finally said. "Those were my last resort, but since you are on a tight schedule, I suppose I can hurry the process along. Ms. Croft, if you will?"

I stood up and dusted my bottom off before walking back up to the counter.

"Try this one, Ms. Croft. Fourteen and a half inches. Hazelwood and basilisk venom twinned with the tail feather of a phoenix. It is excellent at transfiguration and conjuring, but it is no slacker at cursing and hexing."

When I took the wand, I was startled when golden sparks shot out of the end, before a sudden rush of euphoria tempered by contentment slammed through my body, from my toes to my hair.

"Hah!" Ollivander suddenly cried out, startling me out of my sudden happiness that I had no explanation for. "A perfect match! Oh, Mr. Potter, after your trip to Yamatai, I wish you would reconsider my offered apprenticeship! You would make a fantastic wandmaker!"

Mr. Potter laughed, before responding. "And I keep telling you, with my luck, the store would burn to the ground inside of a week."

Mr. Ollivander just shook his head good naturedly.

"I'm assuming you want her to have a holster?"

"Muggle and magical oriented notice-me-not, anti-summoning, impervious, conscious removal only, and a mole-skin pouch built in please."

"Expensive, but not for you. I'm assuming you want one for all three of them?"

"Of course. Ms. Nishimura, your turn."

I stepped back, still examining my wand, intrigued by the patterns on it even as a feeling of warmth continued flowing from my wand hand, down my arm, and into my chest. About five minutes later, I looked up when I heard birds chirping in the air, only to startle when I saw skeleton birds frolicking in the air around Sam.

"Thirteen inches. Elderwood and unicorn tail hair, twinned with that of a thestral. I believe this will fit you most well, Ms. Nishimura." Ollivaner said. "Unfortunately, your ancestor's magic has long tainted her descendants, and even you are not untouched by her corruption. This shows itself in your wand's penchant for death. You are a very pure soul, Ms. Nishimura, else, you would not be capable of using any wand with a unicorn hair core, however, the amount of death and destruction that your ancestor has caused over the millennia, gives you a close connection with symbols of death. Thestrals are supremely magical creatures, but they are only capable of being seen by those who have witnessed death. Not seen a body already dead, but seen the life leave a person's body with your own eyes.

"However, you are a strong girl, who can recover from almost anything with the right care and compassion. Mr. Maiava, I believe you now need a wand."

Sam stepped back towards me, and we stood next to each other, staring at our wands with a bit of apprehension, but no small amount of wonder.

"I believe it is time for me to simply give you the wand I have been holding onto for almost two decades now. Twelve and three quarter inches. Tanekaha wood and the claw of a taniwha. Very powerful, and good for transfiguration and charms, Mr. Maiava." Ollivander said.

When Jonah waved his wand, a gout of water exploded from the tip of it, quickly forming into a small, oriental styled dragon that roared before flying out the door that opened in the nick of time.

"Ah, wonderful." Ollivander sighed. "Now, Mr. Potter, I believe that will be sixty eight galleons for the wands, and the requested holsters. Also, I believe that you and Ms. Croft have important matters to discuss."

"Yes, thank you, Ollivander." Mr. Potter said. "The holsters, please?"

Ten minutes later, we walked out of the wand shop, my wand held securely in a holster that was hidden on my right forearm. Mr. Potter said that he would explain the magic that hid it, but the short version was that the holster was invisible and unnoticeable to anyone but me, even if someone touch searched me.

"Now, I believe the book shop is a good place to go next." Mr. Potter said. "Your head will get so full of information like my own that you will forget what you know, like I have."

When we walked closer to a store that had enormous tomes displayed in the front windows, I was skeptical of whether or not we would find anything of use. That thought went out of my head as soon as I stepped inside and saw the floor to ceiling shelves and stacks of books, some of the latter of which twisted and leaned so precariously, I could only assume magic was how they stood upright.

"Ah, Harry!"

I looked in the direction of the voice that had called Mr. Potter's first name, and I saw a beautiful woman in an attractive blue dress move out from behind the counter. She was probably Indian, judging by her skin tone and facial features, although South Asian wouldn't have been off either, I think.

"Padma, how are you?" Mr. Potter asked, accepting the hug from the woman.

"Oh, I'm doing great, Harry." The now named Padma said. "I see you picked up a couple of strays."

"Hey now." Sam interjected, obviously interested in Padma's dress.

"Strays they may be, but these two hooligan girls are now my apprentices, since they're too old to attend Hogwarts." My teacher said, and I shot him a look conveying my displeasure at being called a hooligan. "And the gentleman behind them is a Pacific Mage."

"Is he now?" Padma said, leaning to the side to see Jonah behind us.

"Hi." He said.

"Padma, I need three sets of students books for years one through seven, and a set of the same for teachers, and a book on warding, curse-breaking, and dueling. Oh, and Arithmancy, and Ancient Runes, with the necessary reference materials."

"That'll be expensive." Padma said, raising an eyebrow at Mr. Potter. The man in question just raised an eyebrow at her. "Oh, fine, ruin my fun."

And with that, Padma whipped out her own wand, and made a few seemingly errant waves as she turned and moved for the counter. Within a minute, there were several dozen books stacked up on it, and I knew my eyes weren't the only ones popped wide.

"That'll be six hundred galleons total, Harry." Padma said.

My teacher moved forward and pulled a slip of paper and pen out of his seemingly bottomless trench coat. He scribbled on it for a moment, before handing it to the woman, who inspected it for a moment.

"Thank you, Harry, I didn't want to spend the next hour counting galleons." She said. "I'm so glad the goblins figured out cheques. At least muggles figured out how to transfer large amounts of money without wasting time."

"No problem." My teacher said. "And yeah, I'm just waiting for when the goblins figure out how to magically recreate credit and debit cards."

I watched as the book keeper blinked in confusion. "I guess I'll have to ask Hermione about those. Preferably when Ron's around, so he can derail her before she gives me information overload. How those two are married, I'll never know. Let alone with kids."

"Lots of angry sex, and make up sex, from what I figure." Mr. Potter said plainly, eliciting a heavy blush from the woman he was talking to, even as he started putting book after book after book into his trench coat. "How else do you think they have so many children?"

"Not what I want to hear right before I go see them, Harry!" Padma scolded, shooting a small red flash of light at his chest.

"Stinging jinx, really Padma?"

"Hurry up with your books and go! I need to close up shop before your fan clubs catch wind of you being here!"

"Fine."

It took him a couple more minutes to drop the last of the books into his trench coat, and then we were off.

"So, where exactly are we?" I finally asked. "I mean, where is this place in England?"

"Well, the pub we apparated into is called the Leaky Cauldron, and that's on Charing Cross Road." Mr. Potter responded thoughtfully. "I suppose Diagon Alley is located in about a six inch wide gap between various buildings, but rune anchored space expansion charms are quite handy, honestly, you could put a football stadium in the same six inch space if you worked the expansion charm right."

"I always heard you British magicals were more than a little crazy, but this just proves it." Jonah said next to me, shaking his head.

"Blame the rampant inbreeding." My teacher said, and I started when I realized he was being serious.

"Inbreeding?" I questioned. "There's inbreeding in the magical world?"

Jonah and Mr. Potter shook their heads.

"That'll be a several hours long discussion." The latter said. "Jonah, think you can take Sam back to the ship, and I'll take Lara?"

"Sure." Jonah said, placing one huge hand on Sam's shoulder. "Same as last time. One, two, three–"

There was a crack, and I was startled to realize that I could actually _see_ their bodies twist and compress on themselves in a minute fraction of a second, seeming to swirl around a pinprick of a drain, before that too, disappeared.

"You see it too, then."

I blinked and turned to look at Mr. Potter.

"See what?" I asked.

"The warping and twisting." He said, gesturing to where Sam and Jonah had disappeared from. "An upside of survival magic is the increased reflexes. This also means we see a bit more of the world than other magicals, like what happens in the fractions of a fraction of a second it takes for us to apparate. Most other people will call you stupid or crazy if you bring it up, so it's best to just keep it to yourself."

I nodded to show that I understood, before allowing him to put his hand on my shoulder, and I automatically held my breath.

He didn't even count.

* * *

 **And that's that. Let me know what you guys all think about the wands! I actually researched the materials in Jonah's wand, don't think I'm just making shit up, because I actually looking up Pacific Islander mythological creatures, though I can't remember if the taniwha is Maori, or other... Jonah's from New Zealand, FYI.**

 **Now, review!**


	5. Ch 5 A Rather In Depth Lesson on Magic

**Well, here's the next chapter. Sorry it's a little late, I've been frazzled with work lately, long hours, plus having to deal with idiots and asshole managers… Anyways, here's the next part of the story. Let me know what ya'll think of it in the reviews!**

If there's one thing I've come to enjoy over the years, it's the shock and awe I see on people's faces as I do the seemingly impossible, even for witches and wizards.

But there's one expression I love seeing above all others: How do I learn to do the same thing?

It's not an expression I see on the faces of purebloods at all, and only on the very rare muggleborn, and for the latter, I curse my fame. Everybody now knows the words of the prophecy pertaining to myself and Tom, and people mostly just assume I hold some secret knowledge about magic. Really, the only limitations of magic are one's imagination.

I've discovered that most of the rules and laws written about in various educational pieces, from first year to subject Mastery, were created simply because someone was either lazy, incompetent, or not imaginative or willful enough to create the effect that they desired.

Most magicals think I'm utterly insane to carry all my personal belongings on my person, wondering what I would do if my trench coat were to be stolen. I never tell anyone that the coat is cursed to return to my vault in Gringotts until such time as I summon it using a built in portkey, or retrieve it manually if I so desire.

As such, I immensely enjoyed the look on Lara and Sam's faces when I started just dropping book after book into my trench coat pocket as I continued talking with Padma in Diagon Alley. Getting back to my cabin on the _Endurance_ was entertaining in the way of listening to Lara and Sam's complaints about apparating.

Once I _got_ to my cabin however, the girls obviously expected me to just start pulling out the books, but that was too predictable.

Instead, I pulled a shrunken suit case out of my pants pocket, and returned it to normal size, before opening it and stepping inside.

"Come on, now," I said over my shoulder, enjoying their utterly gobsmacked expressions. "There's more room in here."

And with that, I went farther down into my suit case, and soon, stepped into the common room of the multi-compartment, expanded house I carried with me at all times.

I heard several thumps and a clatter, before there was a loud racket, and I turned to see Sam and Lara both fall to the floor in a tangle of limbs and disheveled clothing and hair.

"Saaaaaaammmmmm!" I heard Lara moan. "That was my _head_!"

"Get your knee out of my vagina!" I heard a breathy voice say, reminding me eerily of that time Seamus got kicked in the balls by Parvati after she found out he had pictures of her in the prefect's bathroom on the fifth floor.

I watched, bemused, as the two girls fought to untangle themselves before standing up, Sam cupping in between her legs. I kept that in mind, that women were just as vulnerable there as men if hit hard enough.

"For the duration of your training, you will be living, eating, and sleeping in here with me. You each have your own room with attached bathrooms." I told them, drawing their attention to me. "In here, I will teach you the practical applications of magic, most particularly with your wands, and out on the ship, I will require you to read a chapter of each subject every week until we reach Yamatai. Between all of that, I will begin teaching you how to perform vitally important survival spells _without_ your wands, for when you need to be discrete around non-magicals. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Master." The girls said, before blinking at each other in confusion.

"First lesson." I said, conjuring three chairs in a circle, and pointing for them to take them, which they do. "Why you call me Master when I ask you a serious question regarding your training."

"Yeah, what's that all about?" Sam asked, looking at Lara. "I'm not exactly into bondage."

"SAM!"

I just laugh at them, reminded of Ron's constant foot-in-mouth syndrome, and Hermione's constant berating of the same.

"No, it has nothing to do with that." I say, growing serious. "Magic is independent, alive, and just a little bit sentient. Magicals direct it, leash it, use it, but _never_ control it."

"So, you're saying magic did it?" Lara asked, and I could see the disappointment and a slight amount of contempt in her eyes.

"Yes." I said. "And no. Magic is as magic does, and if there's one thing I've learned in my thirty three years of life, it's that magic has a plan for my life. One that I'm not always happy with, seeing as how the first seventeen years of my life were controlled by a prophecy that was made and pointed almost directly at me since before I was born. _The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches ... Born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies ... And the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not ... And either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives._ "

"You mean, prophecies are real?" Lara asked, curiosity overcoming her other emotions for the moment. I was glad. A recalcitrant apprentice is never a good thing.

"Yes." I said. "However, a true Seer will never remember the prophecy they make, as their mind is so thoroughly immersed in the future that all information storage capabilities of the brain are, for lack of a better phrase, turned off."

"So, what does that have to do with us calling you Maser?" Sam interrupted, and I shook my head to get back on track.

"Sorry, tangent." I apologized. "Anyways, free will does exist, as there are infinite possibilities, there are also infinite futures, however, magic has an idea of how it wants things to go, and thus, will sometimes prod a magical in the direction magic wants them to go. Sometimes it's more obvious than others, but for the most part, magic is content to let us do as we please.

I sighed, and rubbed my eyes, feeling the last week without sleep suddenly catch up with me.

"However, the more powerful you are, the more interested magic is in you." I explain. "Excluding your ancestor on Yamatai, Sam, the three most powerful witches and wizard in the world, are sitting in this room. Normally, I go out of my way to avoid anyone in the top one hundred powerful witches and wizards, simply because they have the highest likelihood of having something happen which causes magic to interfere in our lives in ways we don't want. More than a few of those hundred just so happen to be my friends here in England. We've been forced to agree to twelve hour visits once every five years, otherwise magic starts to get restless. Restless magic is bad luck for ones as powerful as us.

"However, magic's been pushing me lately, far more so than usual, and when it gets _really_ insistent, like it has been for the last month, I tried to figure out why. So, I researched ships and ship owners that have a habit of straddling the lines of legality around the globe, and found Roth. Then I researched his acquaintances, and found Lord Richard Croft. Then I found Lara Croft, and later, her friend Samantha Nishimura. A few hours more research, I had a link to Yamatai, and I stopped fighting magic because, obviously, according to it, I needed to meet you two. Magic clouded my mind, just as it did for the first seventeen years of my life until I defeated Voldemort, and by the time it pulled back and allowed me to fully comprehend what was going on, it was too late, as I'd already shaken both of your hands, forever tying us together.

"You mean…" Sam trailed off for a moment, obviously trying to connect a few loose ends in her mind. "You mean, magic can just… take control of us?"

"… Not so much _control_ , as _direct_." I said, tilting my head side to side. "Magic will always get what it wants, never doubt that. And what magic got, in this case, is a pair of Apprentice Bonds."

"Why can I hear the capitols in that title?" Lara asked, an expression of shock and confusion on her face. "That doesn't make sense."

"Because words are power." Sam said, eyes wide. "You read about it in fantasy novels, but…"

"Yes." I nod. "Words, certain words, not all words, have power. And when I asked you two to become my apprentices, I inadvertently Called upon Olde Magicks."

"I can literally _hear_ the capitols." Lara said, shaking her head.

I nodded again.

"The last Apprentice Bond was a very long time ago, and it was between–"

"Merlin and Morgana!" Lara gasps, eyes wide, and I see Sam slowly take on the same expression of shock, before her brows furrowed.

"But what happened to them?" she asked. "There are all those tales about them, but never anything about what happened."

"… Nobody knows for certain, but I have a distinct fear that I know what _might_ have happened." I told her, leaning back in my chair and crossing my arms.

"And what is it you _fear_ happened?" Lara asked, leaning closer. I sighed.

"I fear that Morgana tried to sever the Apprentice Bond before fulfilling the Oath involved in her undertaking the apprenticeship to Merlin." I say. "Merlin and Morgana were the two most powerful magicals on the face of the earth, _without_ anything augmenting them. The magical backlash might've annihilated them both, not unlike matter/anti-matter annihilation. One is held as the epitome of the Light, the other, the Dark. It's not extravagant to imagine that scenario.

"On top of that, witches and wizards are extremely long-lived, and the more powerful a witch or wizard, the longer they will live. Merlin was already three hundred and eighty by the time he took on Morgana as an apprentice when she was sixty. Merlin could pass as a wizened fifty year old, which in those days would've still been considered old, and Morgana was still passing as a barely-of-age woman." I paused to let them mull that over. "Considering the fact that I haven't aged at all since I turned seventeen, I can expect a lifespan of almost six hundred years. Or more. I _am_ more powerful than Merlin, after all."

I paused once again to let them figure out where that would leave them.

"… And you said I was at least as powerful as Morgana." Sam whispered.

"And I'm more powerful than Morgana." Lara said, and I could see her eyes widen in horror, and I nodded at her. "But, Jonah…?"

"Is very powerful, and I fully expect him to come very close to two hundred before leaving on the next great adventure." I tell her the truth, glad that I can at least tell her that she'll have someone other than myself and Sam for the next several centuries. Probably longer.

"I need to focus on the positives." Sam said suddenly, shaking her head. "Will I look as good as you by the time I'm your age?"

"Yes." I laugh, keeping an eye on Lara. "I expect you'll still be picking up barely legal boy toys long into your nineties, while they think you're still jail-bait."

A brilliant smile lights up her face, while Lara merely shakes her head in exasperation at her friend.

"You're incorrigible." She said to her American friend. "So, what do we learn first?"

I smile, glad that Sam's getting serious again.

"The first thing that you're going to do," I pause, letting their anticipation build as I reach into my coat pocket. "Is read chapters one and two of the Standard Book of Spells, Grade One. Once you have done so, we will review the material, and begin on the practical application."

I pull out two copies of the named book, and float them over to the two disappointed girls, who open the books reluctantly.

"Well, I'm off." I said, clapping my hands together and rubbing them quickly. "If you need me, I shall be in the ship's galley, probably listening to, and telling, stories. And I might be inebriated. Tally ho!"

And with that, I moved up and out of my suit case, before simply sitting on my bunk in the room assigned to me, while I smirked at the moaning and complaining echoing up from my suit case.


	6. Ch 6 A Matter of Survival

**Sorry, meant to get this out yesterday, but my mother is sick, and I'm having to pick up all the slack around the house. I might end up missing work to take care of her tomorrow too, as well as taking her to the doctor's... Anywho, I'm sorry this is late. Let me know if there are any typos or mistakes in reviews please, and, as always, I enjoy reviews!**

* * *

"Sadistic bastard." Sam said next to me. "Homework! We're almost done with college, and he's throwing more homework at us?!"

"… I guess it makes sense." I shrugged, opening my book. "If there are magical schools all around the world, I suppose there's got to be some kind of standardized teaching and testing."

"Of course you'd think that." Sam sighs next to me, and I ignore her to immerse myself in the literature.

An hour later, I finish the first two chapters, and then wander around the large apartment that we seem to be in. I marvel at the fact that there's no rocking sensation in here, remembering that the thing that contained this incredible space is sitting on the floor of the _Endurance_ , which I know sways slowly back and forth with the waves of the tide. The smell of saltwater doesn't penetrate this apartment, and I think I like that, since the place smells pleasantly of nothing in particular. When I enter the common room again, I see that Harry is back, and doesn't seem to be at all inebriated, since he's quite clearly explaining the motion of the spell we learned in the book.

"So glad you could join us!" he snarked happily. "So, what did you think?"

"… It… was informative." I say hesitantly. And really, it was, there was enough theory there to satisfy most physics professors. "I honestly wasn't expecting for there to be that much theory to magic."

"Mmm. Imagine my surprise when I got to Hogwarts, and learned how much writing there was going to be." Harry said. "We wrote on rolls of parchment using quills and inkpots, and our essays were length dictated by inches of parchment written. And you couldn't write huge, or else your grade suffered."

"That sounds horrible." Sam shuddered, and I smirked as I remembered how many times she'd scraped passing grades thanks to last minute cramming.

"Yeah." Harry chuckled. "However, thanks to the fact that I'm only teaching the two of you, we'll be doing in depth discussions to judge your understanding of the subject matter, which will allow us to move through the syllabus faster. However. I expect you to keep up with Lara, Sam. Lara, use whatever methods you deem necessary to get her to keep up with you."

"Yes, Master." I say, and then I frown when I realize the Oath kicked in… "How is it I'm _thinking_ in capital letters?"

"Magic is as magic does." Harry shrugged. "Now, Sam, you practice the _Lumos_ spell, while I talk to Lara."

"Yes, Master." Sam says, and I see her blink and shrug before pulling out her wand.

"Come with me." Harry says to me, and I respond appropriately, trying to ignore the way 'Master' lingers on my lips.

We enter the kitchen, and he motions for me to sit at the bar counter, while he moves to the refrigerator.

"How much do you weigh, my apprentice?" Master asks, and I wince as I respond.

"About fifty seven kilos, Master." I say, uncomfortable with the way I'm forced to tell the truth.

Harry sighs, and I see him starting to pull out bacon, eggs, sausages, milk, and various other foods and ingredients come spiraling out of cabinets around me.

"Lara, how much do you think I weigh?" Harry asks, and I blink at the unexpected question.

"I don't know, maybe sixty eight kilos?" I guess, and see him shake his head.

"I weigh just over ninety five kilos, Lara." He says, and I feel my mind straining at the impossibility of it, looking at his runner's build and slightly below average height, versus the weight he says he is at. "Survival magic works in a lot of ways in our bodies. One of the more subtle ways, is in the sheer amount of mass we pack into our bodies. The average bone density for men is about 3.88 g/cm3, and for women, is 2.90 g/cm3."

He paused, and I realized he was making an enormous breakfast with all the ingredients he's gotten out.

"Why are you telling me this?" I question.

"Because, my bone density is 11.64 g/cm3, three times the average." Harry said, and I sat back, wondering if that was the totality of why he was so heavy. "Following that logic, your bone density _should_ be about 8.7 g/cm3. Muscle tissue should be about 1.06 kilos per liter, while mine is 4.24 kilos per liter. Again, following that logic, so should yours."

I sit in silence, trying to figure out how much he is implying I should weigh, when he appears to take mercy on me.

"You should weigh just under eighty four kilos." He says, and I can't help my jaw dropping in shock.

"I'll be huge!" I protest at last. "I'll be _fat_!"

I can't keep the contempt of the idea of being fat out of my voice. I may simultaneously enjoy and hate my oversized breasts, but at least I know where all my fat is mostly going! If I were to weigh eighty four kilos, I'd have to be _rolled_ everywhere!

"You will be precisely like how you look now."

And just like that, I'm riveted in my seat, meeting Master's eyes, and I try to comprehend… something there in those pools of depthless green, something that makes me understand that I am a mere mouse before an angry python, encircled on all sides by power that I can never hope to comprehend –

And then I can breathe again, and I'm hacking and choking on air as I collapse on the table.

"Do I look like I weigh ninety five kilos, Lara?" Master asks quietly, and I take a moment to answer.

"… No…" I choke out. "You don't."

"Then what makes you think that you will look like you weigh eighty four?"

And I think about it.

He doesn't look like he weighs almost twenty kilos more than he should. He doesn't move like it either…

"… I guess I'm still stuck in the mindset of magic not being real." I murmur at last.

"… I hope you don't repeat any of my mistakes." Harry sighs out, and I can't help but raise my eyebrows, but he's already turned his back to me once again, flicking fingers this way and that, and I realize that there's a full American breakfast being made in front of me. "Now, since we need to provide your body with all the nutrients it needs to achieve the weight class you need to be in, you're going to be eating one of _my_ meals before you go eat in the galley with the rest of the crew. Yes, that means six meals a day, and a nutrient potion in the evenings before you go to sleep."

"… Um, just out of curiosity, how many calories a day is that going to be?" I ask timidly, wondering if I even had the stomach capacity for six full meals a day.

"Something around eight thousand." Harry shrugs, and I put a hand over my stomach.

"Over the teeth, past the gums, look out stomach, here it comes." I mumble quietly to myself, and then look down at the enormous plate of food Harry's just put in front of me with the necessary cutlery

"Eat up, and then once you're done, we'll have our discussion on magic, and have you practicing the _Lumos_ spell until you go to bed."

I spend the rest of the night replete with _far_ too much well-made food, discussing theory in depth with someone whose knowledge dwarfs my own, and practicing something that I had dismissed as fairy tales for most of my life.


	7. Ch 7 Magical Survival 101

**Well, here we are again. This chapter is a bit of a filler from Harry's point of view, but I rather like slice-of-life snippets within stories that have a tendency to be dark/adventure-filled. And trust me, things are going to be getting dark.**

 **Anyways, to my fellow Americans, Happy Independence Day, to my British readers, Happy Fireworks Day, (I'm sorry if I have the name wrong, all I know is that you guys set off fireworks at/around the same time) and to everyone else, please enjoy your summer!**

 **Comodo50: Your question from your review for chapter 5 is answered in this chapter, so enjoy! And for chapter 6, think of killing intent from Naruto, same concept, just done via magic, with a direct pipeline from Harry to Lara, meaning no possible dilution of the effects.**

 **Bountyhunter1977: For the most part, I just imagined Lara looking like her Shadow of the Tomb Raider self, but I had that image before we actually got to see a picture of her new physique in the trailer. As is, just scale her breasts up a size or three. Bigger, but nothing that would get in her way like I imagine the 2000's version of her did.**

 **Agnar: I'm sorry to hear that you don't like first person point of view writing, however, my writing style was heavily influenced in the beginning by James Patterson's Maximum Ride series, which is told in first person. As such, I spend far more time writing in first person, and as a result, my best writing is done in first person. If you don't like it, no one is forcing you to continue reading my story.**

 **To all my readers: I am only going to post one chapter a month. My muse jumps from story to story like a frog chasing a cloud of flies, and as such, I have to follow along until it comes back around to this story. When it does, I write as much as I can, usually a chapter or two, and I have about fourteen chapters written, however, I don't want to post all of them, and lose many of you because you think I've abandoned this fic if I don't post for a couple months. That is why I post one chapter a month, no more, no less, in order for me to make sure that I have more chapters to give you guys. Also, your reviews are fuel for my writing, and I really enjoy seeing you all enjoying my story.**

 **Now, with all of that out of the way, here's the story.**

When we finally left port, Lara and Sam had already managed to master the first spells taught in each of the first year books, and memorized much of the theory. I think that allowing Sam four million pounds to buy camera memory chips and battery packs might've been a wee bit excessive, but she was determined to record all of our discussions on magic, and practicing of the same.

Lara's weight has begun the grudgingly slow climb up the scale, and Sam bemoans her inability to eat the same amount of food as Lara, and maintain her figure. In response, I've started Sam on a physical fitness regimen that should have her in the Olympics neighborhood in the next year or so, but that would still leave her eating Lara and mine's dust, both in food consumption, and in physical abilities.

Jonah is moving through the spells at a prodigious rate, spending a few hours each night after dinner in my suit case, practicing the actual spells, and receiving help from me when I'm not deep in theory discussions with my two students. Roth and Reyes enjoy watching me humiliate my students in our mock duels, limited to first year jinxes and hexes, and Sam and Lara are left awestruck by the displays of magic between Jonah and myself. The New Zealander, as expected, was extraordinarily predisposed to water and wind based magic, and on more than one occasion, had whipped up a miniature typhoon in my dueling hall. Everyone except for me and him seemed upset at the impromptu showers this created.

Sam and Lara brow beat me into teaching them the Drying and Warming Charms after the third time they got soaked by Jonah and me.

By the end of the first month, Lara and Sam are halfway through their third year spells using their wands, and are finally getting the first year spells down wandlessly. I fear that I'm going to have to start using the Time Turner in my old school trunk to make sure they have enough skill to use wards and healing spells by the time we get to Yamatai. My gut is churning whenever I think of the girls in association with the legendary island, and the idea of them being hurt just makes it worse. I'm having a hard time distinguishing between my Master-Apprentice Bond just being protective, and my simple old Saving People Thing. To be honest, I'm not sure which I would prefer.

By the end of the second month, Lara is asking for more spells beyond seventh year, and tearing through all of the extra course material and theory books at a pace that would make Hermione proud, and Sam is recording all of our discussions, even the ones _not_ pertaining to magic, but just to Yamatai in general. Roth and Reyes enjoy watching some of the less theory heavy videos, and Jonah has begun teaching us some of his people's brand of magic. I'm having to use copious amounts of Arithmancy to deconstruct his spells, and create wand movements for them, but the incantations are, thankfully, the same. Figuring out the wandless aspect will be more difficult, seeing as how his spells are channeled through his tattoos, which are made with magical ingredients, and the rest of us don't have those tattoos. I might just have to correct that when this adventure is over.

At the same time, Lara's strength and reflexes have been improving by leaps and bounds, and her speed already outstrips my own. Thankfully, she hasn't figured out independent flight, but that's just another thing I'll have to teach her. Sam, on the other hand, is seeing a steady increase in her physical capabilities, and has professed a desire to continue this kind of exercise until the day she dies.

I fear death will never come for the three of us, though.

An aspect of the Master-Apprentice Bond that I have figured out, is that there is a power-sharing/power-amplifying going on between the three of us. There is, for lack of a better analogy, a pair of magical pipes, connecting my magical core to theirs, and theirs to mine. My core is sending magic to theirs, which takes it, amplifies it, and sends it back, creating an infinite feedback loop between me, and each of them.

I fear what will happen if a bond of any kind springs up between Lara and Sam. I don't think the world was meant to see any true immortals. For that is surely the path that we are treading.

When we stop in Malaysia for a second resupply, I take Jonah and the girls with me to the local Magical Community, and spend the day explaining the differing magical beliefs and customs and basic spells. Lara is, of course, fascinated by it all, and Sam is fascinated by Lara's incessant monologuing, resulting in some fourteen memory chips used by the end of our day in port, and Jonah sporting a headache from trying to decipher Lara's Archaeology speak, and the Malaysian magical dialect that is just different enough from the non-magical version as to give us a difficult time communicating with the locals.

In the end, we spent about a million galleons on food and potions supplies that I wouldn't be able to get back in England, along with the common ingredients so that I could start teaching my least favorite subject to my two apprentices. Potions.

The first thing that I taught them, was an infection killing potion, followed by the blood replenishing potion. Then I spent the last month of our trip to Yamatai teaching Lara, Sam, and Jonah all of the healing spells I knew, and every ward and curse I could cram into their heads, and enchanting a few trinkets for Roth, Reyes, and Alex that would allow them to detect active magic, and pass through any wards the four of us magicals might put up, while also hiding the trinkets from anybody that wasn't the seven of us.

It was complicated warding and rune carving, something that I took advantage of to show my apprentices how to chain runes together for various effects. Lara's experience with old written dialects proved to her advantage in understanding the runes and their purported effects, but Sam's childhood of calligraphy training won over Lara's knowledge, and Sam was soon carving before Lara. It was intriguing though, seeing Lara's language expertise flowing from her to Sam's rune carving.

As we approached the line that separated the Dragon's Triangle from the rest of the Sea of Japan, I sat the officers of the _Endurance_ and my apprentices down, and explained to them how I had managed to survive for so long, working as I have ever since I defeated Tom.

"Why are we all in our underwear?" Sam asked, her camera set up in a corner as Roth, Reyes, Alex, Jonah, Sam, Lara, and I all stood in the common room of my suit case, all, as Sam had pointed out, in nothing but our underwear.

"Because." I said, pacing back and forth, gripping the Elder Wand in both hands. "My instincts are getting closer to DEFCON 1 the closer we get to Yamatai. I'm taking no chances, so, here's what we're going to do.

"I am going to layer an Unbreakability Charm, and an Impervius Charm onto your skin." I explained. "The Unbreakability Charm does what the title says, while the Impervius Charm will prevent any liquid or dirt from sticking to you. Simple third year spells, typically overlooked simply because they're spells you learn in third year at school, and then promptly forget later on in order to learn other, more 'interesting' spells and such.

"What about the bones, and internal organs?" Lara asked, one arm trying to hide her impressive bust from anyone's sight. "Unbreakable skin won't save us from broken bones and ruptured organs if we fall from too high up."

"Excellent question!" I exclaimed, spinning to face her. "You see, I came across that problem when I was nineteen. Unbreakable skin, all well and good, but bullets hurt like a bitch! But, I remembered when I was twelve, and my incompetent, fraud of a Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher vanished the bones in my arm after they'd been broken. I'd had those bones regrown overnight with a little bit of Skele-grow, but one of the effects of taking a dose when all your bones are fully healed, is an over calcification of your bones. Couple this with the Hardening Charm, which turns materials into rock, and layer all that with an Unbreakability Charm, and you have some of the most solid bones out there that just so happen to be unbreakable."

"What about us non-magicals?" Reyes interjected. "How will this affect us?"

"Normally, the potions need magic in the body of the recipient to work, or else it just tastes like a particularly bad dose of shite." I said. "Which is why I will be the one working these spells, and providing the necessary magic for the potions to work in the bodies of you non-magicals."

"Okay, so that's bones and skin." Sam said, completely at ease with letting everyone see the fantastic body she'd been working on for nearly three months now. "What about internal organs?"

"Easy." I shrugged. "Containment Charm intertwined with a Cushioning Charm. The first keeps the internal organs where they belong, the other one prevents any impacts from feeling worse than a haymaker to the abdomen."

"Anything else we should know about?" Reyes asked.

"Just that you should all get comfortable." I pointed out. "I'll be starting with you in descending order of importance, with Roth, then you Reyes, then Alex, then Jonah, and then finally my apprentices. I expect to take about an hour with each of you, barring complications."

"Like?" Roth asked.

"Oh, just weak bones, which means a double dose of Skele-grow, maybe healing a cut or scrape here and there, maybe some burns, which, now that I think about it, means I ought to layer a Flame Freezing Charm into your skin and clothes so that you can walk through fire without worrying about getting burned."

"Well, the sooner we get this done with, the sooner we can all regain our dignity." Roth pointed out. "Well, here goes."

I chuckled as Roth laid down on his back, and soon I set to work, having Lara and Sam stand over my shoulders as I showed them the process, and explained how I was doing what I was doing.

As I had expected, Roth needed two doses of Skele-grow to get his bones back up to snuff before I performed the Hardening and Unbreakable Charms. The rest of the charms were easier to apply, and far easier overall than doing it to myself. After that, I sent him off and got started on Reyes.

I had started this process around five in the evening, and by the time I finished working Jonah over, it was closer to eleven than ten.

"So, now the threesome starts?"

I turned to look at Sam, who was being facetiously flirty, while Lara's blush worked down to her breasts from her hairline.

"No," I smirked. "It starts after I have you two all nice and magicked up."

"Harry!"

I couldn't hold it anymore, and Sam and I keeled over onto our backs at Lara's indignant squeak.

"Kidding, kidding!" I waved off once I got my laughter under control. "Sam, you're up, and then you Lara. After we're done, you need to go to sleep, because tomorrow, I'm going to have you two learn how to use the Undetectable Extension Charm on your pockets, and the relevant charms necessary to keep everything organized so that all you have to do is stick your hand in your pockets while thinking of what you want, and have it slap into your hand almost immediately. Trust me, it'll make life so much easier."

With that, I began working my magic on Sam, and I was interested to note that her magic was… helping me. Making the charms and spells a bit more powerful, leading the magic where I wanted it to go faster, it was… odd. But not unwelcome.

"Don't have too much fun, now!" Sam giggled, before scampering to her bedroom, avoiding the wandless Stinging Hex Lara'd thrown her way, leaving only us two survival mages in my common room, with Sam's camera still recording away.

"Ready?" I asked her.

"Yeah." Lara sighed, laying down before adjusting her bra to try and keep her impressive bust contained. "I just wish I hadn't gone up three cup sizes since you started stuffing me with food."

"Not my fault." I said, holding my hands up in surrender. "By the time I had the chance to eat as much as my body and magic wanted me to, I had a lot of mass to make up for, and went from medium shirts to larges. There's some controversy over whether or not magic makes our bodies conform to what is commonly accepted as attractive in an effort to gain a mate. I'll admit, there's some good arguments for that theory, but I don't think we fit into that one."

"Then what would you say we fit into?" Lara asked, blushing as my wand traced lazy loops up her thighs, not touching, but close enough for her to feel the wand movement in the air.

"I'd say, for you personally, your body is attempting to store up excess fats, nutrients, and minerals." I muse. "It's possible that your subconscious is directing your magic to do so in anticipation of needing it on our upcoming adventure, though I hope that proves unnecessary, and I'd rather be put out at all my hard work in getting you where you need to be physically being undone like that."

"Are you sure it's not just because you like looking at my chest?" Lara shot back.

I blinked, surprised at the repartee, but definitely not unwelcome in my book.

"I never said I didn't think you were an attractive woman, Lara." I said gently. I'd had this conversation with Ginny when I realized that magic was going to push us together, simply because she was the first daughter born to the Weasley family in seven generations, after the Malfoys had put a curse on them to prevent any daughters. The fact that Ginny was a seventh child meant that the curse's power had essentially been dumped into her, leaving her massively powerful. In all honesty, only Hermione and McGonagall could match her, though the latter two had a hell of a lot more control.

Lara was silent for a few moments, before she grimaced as I forced her to take the Skele-grow potion.

"To be honest, Lara, I was expecting to live a rather long and lonely life." I explained. "I'm going to live for a _very_ long time, and remain in my peak physical form for a couple of centuries at the least. You and Sam… well, I suppose living for centuries with a couple of beautiful women is better than some of the other possibilities my life could've provided."

"Oh?" Lara questioned, and I heard both annoyance and playfulness in her voice. "Just 'better'?"

"I could've had two burly Russian loggers as apprentices."

Lara blanched, before choked laughter bubbled up her throat.

"Okay, that's a hilariously atrocious image." She chuckled.

The rest of the time it took me to apply the spells and charms was spent in companionable silence, and once I was done, I sat back on my haunches and sighed.

"What's wrong?" Lara asked, sitting up and once again adjusting her bra. I noticed her frown at it, and made a mental note to contact Hermione for that clothing charm she'd used during our adventures after we'd hit puberty.

"I've been layering protection charms and spells onto the _Endurance_ , and charming everything unbreakable that I can get to, from hull to frame, but I'm still worried that it's not going to be enough."

"It _will_ be enough, Master."

I looked at Lara, surprised by her voluntary use of the title that I knew she hated using.

"I'm serious!" she insisted. "And besides, even if the ship is completely wrecked, you've promised Roth a new one. So long as he actually gets it once this is over, I'm pretty sure he'll forgive you for anything happening to his baby."

We both chuckled, and then I stood and moved towards my coat, digging into one of the pockets.

"Go ahead and get dressed." I said over my shoulder. "I've got someone I want you to talk to."

Then I used a switching spell to put my clothes on instantly, and walked out of the common room to the hallway of all the bedrooms.

"Hermione Weasley, I could use a little assistance here." I said, looking down at the small handheld mirror in my hand. It was a remake of the one Sirius had given me a couple decades ago, and linked to mirrors that everyone in the DA had. They made communicating much easier, instead of using the old Protean Charmed galleons.

" _Harry!"_

I looked back down at the mirror, and smiled at the face of one of my best friends.

"Hey, Hermione." I said. "How're you?"

" _I'm fine, Harry."_ She said, smiling brightly at me. _"What about you? What do you need my help for?"_

"I'm fine." I answered in turn. "Look, a few months ago, I got dragged into another mess, this time by the Japanese MoM, and in looking for a muggle transport, I ended up with two Morgana-class apprentices."

" _Only you, Harry."_ She shook her head, a bemused expression on her features. _"So, what's the_ real _problem?"_

"Both of them are women, and one of them happens to be exceptionally endowed," I said, holding the mirror away from me and motioning for a large bust, causing Hermione's lips to purse as her eyebrows pulled together in consternation. "My gut's telling me we're all about to step in it, and I figure the least I can do is help her keep contained, if you know what I mean."

" _Yes, Harry, I'll teach her the Bra Support Charm."_ Hermione said, rolling her eyes at me. _"Hand me over to her."_

"One moment." I said, moving back into the common room in time to see Lara lacing up her boots. "Lara, I have someone here who wants to talk to you."

Lara stood up, ignoring the unfinished laces, and came closer, confused.

"Hermione Weasley, meet Lara Croft, my apprentice." I said, moving so that Hermione could see my apprentice. "Lara Croft, meet one of my two best friends, Hermione Weasley, nee Granger."

" _Hello, Lara."_ Hermione said, smiling gently at my apprentice. _"How are you doing?"_

"I-I-I-I'm fine." Lara stuttered. "Is this a mirror that's been charmed for instantaneous long distance communication?"

I blinked, and Hermione looked surprised, before a positively possessive gleam came into her eyes.

" _Oooh, I_ like _this one Harry."_ Hermione said. _"So, Lara, I hear that you could use a little support in the chest area?"_

"Hermione, teach her, but I need her asleep soon." I interjected, beginning to back away from my obviously peeved apprentice. "She needs to be awake in six hours to assist in final preparations for our adventure."

" _Of course, Harry."_ Hermione called, since I was out of her line of sight now. _"Now run along, I'll have your apprentice back to you in no time at all!"_

"That's what I'm afraid of." I muttered to myself as I moved towards my Fidelliused room. Having one inside of a magically expanded trunk was a bit redundant, but I'd rather have a bolt hole in my bolt hole that only I knew about.

I'd found out the hard way that Lara had a penchant for fire that made me question her matrilineal heritage. The only reason why I knew she wasn't a Veela was because all Veela fire is blue, and Lara's were green, which was apparently her favorite color.


	8. Ch 8 Breaking a Statute Or Seven

**Okay, so here's chapter eight! This one was interesting because I was debating the thing with the crew (as you'll see in the chapter) but overall, I ended up going through with it because reasons. I'll explain at the bottom after you've finished.**

 **Velial13: Let me explain my thinking, okay? I gave Jonah magic because he's the only person in canon who has remained by Lara's side since Yamatai. Reyes went her own way, Sam is in a mental hospital as far as I know (I haven't read the comics, I need to though) Roth is dead, Alex is dead, and Grim is dead, so obviously they can't, and Whitman just needed to die from the get go (in case you couldn't tell, I hate that man with a passion, which just goes to show how good the characterization is). So, in my story, Jonah has magic. As we've seen in Shadow of the Tomb Raider trailers and gameplay trailers, Jonah is still with Lara, backing her up. Guy deserves a small fortune just keeping up with Lara in RotTR. Anyways, I gave Sam magic because, as we see in the video game, she's Himiko's descendent, and in my story, she's a descendent of Himiko's ORIGINAL body, the one that had the most power, originally, before she started jumping bodies like Orochimaru in Naruto. As I explained in story, she's not a trained witch because of her canonical forced nomadic lifestyle, in response to her parents' production company's needs. Wherever she was born registered her birth for the local magical school, but she was most likely NOT in country when she reached the appropriate age, and we all know how arrogant magical purebloods are, so they probably didn't go looking for her when the invitation didn't go through. Lara's special though. As I said in the story, she has survival magic, and she was born during the peak of when Death Eaters were getting rid of records of muggleborns. Sam probably lived a pretty cushy life, which means she probably never had any noticeable accidental magic, and Lara's magic was already primarily engaged in KEEPING HER ALIVE. Even when she wasn't necessarily in danger, or dying.**

 **On to the power issue. Yes, Harry is more powerful than Merlin, yes, so is Lara, and Sam is on the level of Morgana. HOWEVER! However, that doesn't make them automatically as good at magic as the two premiere magic practitioners. Naruto has had a massive effect on multiple other fandoms, and Harry Potter is the best way to see this difference, prior to, and after the changes wrought by Naruto. In Naruto, everyone has chakra reserves, which here is how much magic a person has, and then there's chakra control, which translates to MAGICAL control. Then there's what the fandom has done to Voldemort, Dumbledore, and Harry. It is the commonly accepted theory that the reason why Voldy and Dumbles always tied in their duels, is because Dumbles had perfect control over his spells, no movement, or magic, wasted. He also had a depth and breadth of magic memorized that is nearly unmatched in his lifetime. He's also incredibly intelligent, and adaptive in his fighting style, resulting in someone, who, while not as magically strong as Merlin, could give Merlin a run for his money, simply due to his control, finesse, and adaptability. Then there's Voldy, who the fandom has accepted as having monstrous magical reserves, a knowledge of the dark arts only rivaled by Dumbles, and a cunning and ruthlessness that allows him to duel Dumbles to a standstill. Then there's Harry, who, in popular fanfiction, has power AT LEAST on par with Voldy, and through vigorous practice during Fourth Year to survive the Triwizard Tournament, control to impress Dumbles. However, Harry's spell repertoire is limited to his Hogwarts education. Also, Harry is at least as intelligent as Hermione, possibly even more so. Think about it, he had to figure out how to pass each and every grade in primary school, but he also had to ensure his grades were lower than Dudley's in order to avoid getting a beating from Uncle Vernon. Trust me, it takes more intelligence to fake being stupid, than to show off your intelligence. So that shows both superlative intelligence, and a cunning most kids JUST DON'T HAVE.**

 **Now, I've handicapped my characters by making it so that using magic causes strain on the body. I got the idea from the movies, and kind of from the books. In canon, we don't hear any witch or wizard go "I'm out of magic, it's up to you." Instead, in the movies, we see that they stop casting spells because they're FUCKING EXHAUSTED, and can't really move due to their exhaustion. Hence, why, even though I'm putting an upper limit on magical capacity in my story, my characters will not be OP. Why? Because it will take YEARS for Sam and Lara to build up the finesse and control that Harry shows now. He wastes very little magic in each spell, but he still waves his wand excessively. Compared to Dumbles though, he's rather like someone dropped an elephant in a china shop. Dumbles could perfectly control the amount of magic in each spell so that there was no wastage. Harry… not so much. Sam and Lara? You ever tried to fit a swimming pool's worth of water in a thimble? The thimble is the spell, and the swimming pool's worth of water is the amount of magic they're trying to put into it. Tons of wastage. Literally. There's also the fact that Lara's magic is already engaged in her survival magic. Meaning that, despite how much magic she HAS, her body is already using a good chunk of it keeping her in tip top condition in preparation for fight-or-flight. So, when it comes to length of time and number of spells cast, Sam can outlast her, despite being, objectively, weaker.**

 **Guest that mentioned Lara using Greek Fire: There's an idea. Not saying it's right or wrong, but it's an interesting idea.**

 **DeathCrawler: Yes, Shadow of the Tomb Raider will be in here, along with Rise of the Tomb Raider. Maybe some of the DLC's too. I've definitely enjoyed Blood Ties, Baba Yaga, and I'm still working through the Cold Darkness DLC, but I'll have to figure out how to add in my little magical twist.**

 **plums: I'm a great fan of your Last Second Savior, so if you PM me, I'll talk with you about some of my ideas, I've been in desperate need of a sounding board if you're willing. That said, part of Lara's appearance is my personal preference for women, partly just for comedic relief opportunities later in the story.**

 **And to EroSlackerMicha! AH! Can't believe you actually favorited my story! Thank you! I love your works, and I really miss your Team Sharingan story, it was incredibly well done, and I truly miss it. I hope you get better after the recent tragedies that have struck you. Get well soon!**

" _He was the epitome of a Gryffindor, yet he's such a coward around women, honestly."_ Hermione said, and I marveled at the perfect clarity of picture and sound, like she was actually in the room with me.

"Gryffindor?" I asked. "What's that?"

" _He hasn't taught you about the Hogwarts Houses?"_ she asked, surprise overcoming her features.

"No," I shrugged. "He's been more concerned with getting our magical knowledge of spells and capabilities up to at least seventh year, with some outlier skills to assist us on this expedition."

" _Yes…"_ she sighed, massaging the bridge of her nose. _"Adventures with Harry tend to be fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants the entire time, interspersed with death defying stunts and mortal injuries that somehow don't kill you. Like the time we broke into Gringotts Goblin Bank, stole an artifact from a vault that was supposedly impregnable, loosed a blind dragon from its bindings, rode it out of the bank, and jumped off its back into a lake in Scottland in mid January from a height of almost three hundred feet. We came out of it with a few burns from a curse in the vault, and hypothermia in our toes and fingers that we got rid of in a couple of hours."_

"… Do you… have survival magic?" I asked, curiosity overcoming my manners for a moment.

" _By dint of seven years of exposure to Harry and engaging in all the semi-legal activities that caused numerous injuries to us, yes, my husband Ron and I both have survival magic."_ Hermione nodded. _"I'm guessing since you're asking, you do too, but it's too soon for Harry to have affected you so."_

"I was a difficult birth." I shrugged. "Both me and my mother should've died, but we didn't, and I've been a pretty healthy girl my whole life."

" _And on top of that, your magic never had anything else to do since Tom Riddle's followers destroyed records of muggleborns, meaning that your survival magic is probably more powerful than mine and Ron's."_ she grimaced. _"Well, enough about that, onto Support Charms!"_

"Please, don't be so chipper." I groaned, rubbing my forehead with my free hand. "Ever since Harry forced me to start eating more to increase my muscle and bone density, my breasts decided it was a good idea to get bigger as well. I've gone up three cup sizes, but since we're at sea, I can't exactly go shopping for new bras, so I've had to just let my bras out to their loosest hooks, and bear with it."

" _Ouch."_

"Yeah. I went from DD, to probably F. I haven't had to worry about side or under-boob since I hit puberty and blew through bras in a few months!"

" _Alright, well, here's the incantation, its–"_

.

When I woke up six hours later, I was happy to find that the charm was still in effect, and I still felt comfortable going braless, something I hadn't done since early in high school. Hermione had also showed me a sizing charm made specifically for bras, so now all my bras fit once again. I was going to have to show Sam later!

After eating a hearty breakfast with Harry, we made our way to the galley, where I had another full breakfast, with Jonah eyeing me warily, and moving towards the pantry that held my beloved Jaffa cakes. I glared at him, and he smirked and moved away as I summoned one to me, using both the summoning and levitation charms to sneak it past all the non-magical crewmen milling about the galley. I bit into it, and Harry just chuckled at me. I had to admit, magic really was useful and fun!

I blinked.

Wow, reduced stress from not having an aching back from my breasts really did improve my disposition, just like Hermione had said! No back pain was a novel concept that I hadn't experienced in years, and that back massaging spell Hermione had taught me put me straight to sleep. Sam would be so excited, once I told her… If I told her…

"Someone's chipper this morning." Roth said, sliding into the empty chair next to me.

"Let's just say I learned some feminine hygiene charms last night that make walking around with my chest far easier," I said, chuckling as Roth choked on his bite of scrambled eggs. After he cleared his airway and took a swig of water, he glared at me, but the intensity was mitigated by his watering eyes.

I couldn't help the giggle that escaped me, and I ran out of the galley giggling like a little girl a few minutes later, Sam trailing after me with questions. We spent the next hour giggling together in the common room of Harry's suit case, before we were called up to the galley, where we saw the entirety of the _Endurance_ crew gathered.

"Thank you all for coming on this dangerous expedition," Harry said. "I'm probably going to be lambasted by governments the world over, but I don't give a fuck because your lives are more important."

There was some uncomfortable shifting around me, and I realized with a bit of horror and more than a little apprehension, that Harry was about to break the Statute of Secrecy wide open.

"Magic is very much real, gentlemen." He said, waving his hand and conjuring a chair that he sat in. "And Yamatai is the home of an ancient sorceress that has amassed enough power to control the weather around her island, wrecking any and all sea and air craft that pass within her area of control. Over the past five thousand years, ships, and in recent decades, air craft, have been crashed, and subsequently confined to the island, with absolutely no chance of escape."

There was grumbling and shifting, and I wondered if we were about to face a mutiny.

"The Japanese Ministry of Magic commissioned me to deal with the sorceress. It's kind of my specialty. Your jobs, will simply to be to stay on the _Endurance_ , and fight off any and all people that are not me, my apprentices Lara and Sam, Jonah, or Roth. We will be dealing with the sorceress." I frowned, wondering why Harry had stipulated that everyone fought off anything that might come for the ship. "With the way my luck runs, there are survivors of the wrecks on the island, and more than likely some megalomaniac in charge who will happily kill everyone who doesn't join him and his fucked up cause. I don't expect you to go out and fight, I don't expect you to try and combat something you don't understand. I expect you to stand and defend this ship.

"Each of you are looking at a million pound bonus once we're back in England, plus hazard pay and full medical coverage if any injuries are accrued that I am personally unable to heal, or that you do not wish me to heal. If you are somehow killed, that money will go to your closest living relative, and the medical coverage for them will be for life. I know money can't fix everything, but sometimes it helps. If you do not want to be involved in this, I have a place to hide you all that will keep you safe until the insanity is over.

"I will leave for fifteen minutes, and you can debate among yourselves what your collective decision will be."

And with that, Harry got up, vanished his chair, and walked out of the galley. As soon as the door shut behind him, the deck master stood up and looked at the crew, silencing them with his glare.

"Well, I don't know about you wusses, but I'm going to _earn_ my million. Show of hands of who's not?" he demanded immediately. A few hands went up. "Then you're off the crew forever once we get back home."

The hands retracted like they'd been burned, and a low grumbling started up.

"We're looking at going to the Asian version of Atlantis." I said, standing up, drawing everyone's attention to me. "The only difference is that Yamatai is real, with actual written records of its existence, not simple legends echoed through time from one generation to another. There will be artifacts, both magical and not, that will go for tens, even hundreds of millions of pounds the world over. From what Harry has taught me and Sam, magicals are willing to pay obscenely well for magical artifacts, and will throw money at you if there's even a hint of an artifact belonging to an ancestor of theirs. There could be billions of pounds involved in this venture, and all your paycheck provider wants, is for you to guard this ship? This ship that how many of you have called home for how long?"

"My daughter's a witch."

I blinked and turned to see Reyes standing up.

"The British magical society looks down on magical people born to non-magical parents. They even disparage non-magicals and the technological wonders we perform regularly now." She said, and I could see the frowns on the men's faces. "But if it came out, and I know Mr. Potter will see that it does, if it came out that a boat full of non-magicals, and no more than four magicals, two of whom have no magical schooling, and might as well be non-magicals themselves, found and successfully revealed the home of a magical kingdom that's been lost for almost five thousand years, we'd be showing magicals how we can do something they can't.

"And when it came out that I was one of the people who helped rediscover it, my daughter's going to be having people falling all over themselves to get in her good books so that they can meet me. And I'm going to enjoy blowing them off like their society has blown me off for so long, simply because I don't have magic. I'm going to take this opportunity to smear it in their faces that I'm just as capable as them. I highly suggest you do the same."

The galley was silent, and then Roth stood up, and all movement and sound ceased.

"My sister was a witch." He said. "She's dead now. Died saving thirty six children from being slaughtered by madmen. Mr. Potter is currently funding those children's lives. Out of his own pocket. He's paying us obscene amounts of money just to transport him to where he can do his fuckin' job. So, here's your assignment from _me_."

He paused, leaning forward slightly, his eyes peering into the faces of the entire crew.

"When Mr. Potter gives the signal, we're all piling into his suit case." There was confusion, until Sam came in with a pop culture reference that put most at ease.

"Think Doctor Who's TARDIS, only, applied to a suit case instead of a police box." She said. "It's got like, a full house inside of it."

"Indeed." Roth said, nodding at Sam. "We pile in there when Mr. Potter tells us to. Then when things calm down, we come back out, and guard the _Endurance_ until Mr. Potter says it's time to go. You all get to stay on the ship. Only me, Mr. Potter, Jonah, Reyes, Alex, Lara, and Sam will be getting off the boat onto the island. Clear?"

There were murmurings, and I felt a wave of relief when I realized that they were all agreeing, albeit grudgingly in some cases, and we wouldn't face a mutiny on Roth's ship.

When Harry came in a few minutes later, and got confirmation that everyone was on board with his plan, he smiled, and then asked Sam to show the crew into his suit case so they could preemptively familiarize themselves with it.

.

"What's wrong, Lara?" I asked, pulling my apprentice aside. Something was troubling her, and it concerned me deeply, especially given how light hearted and giggly she was earlier this morning.

"You ran the risk of having a mutiny on Roth's ship." She said, avoiding looking me in the eye.

I winced.

"Yes, I did." I admitted. "But!"

Her mouth was open to lay into me, but I stopped that by pressing a finger to her lips.

"But…" I said, getting her to look me in the eye. "Which is more important? Keeping a secret that would've been blown wide open anyways once we got to Yamatai, and risk everyone here dying, or tell them, risk a mutiny, and simply lock everyone and everything of value up in my suit case until we're done on Yamatai?"

That seemed to stop her, for a moment, before she swelled up in a manner not dissimilar to Hermione getting ready for a long-winded tirade, and I just cringed slightly before resigning myself to a tongue lashing.

"But what about the rest of us?!" she exclaimed. "Roth, Reyes, Grim, Alex, Jonah, Sam?! What about them?! How long would it have been before you got in there to save them? They're not you! They're not me! They would've been overwhelmed in seconds by that many men, and somebody would've gotten a lucky shot in on me eventually, regardless of anything! You're playing with lives here, and you don't seem to care! How can I–"

"Stop." I said, voice tight. "Just… stop."

She was breathing hard, and her face was flushed in anger.

"First, most of the people you named have all been magically treated by me, remember?" I pointed out, getting a grudging nod from her. "Two. Just because they're not _us_ , does not mean they're vulnerable. Roth can handle himself, Reyes used to be a cop in one of the most dangerous precincts in a rough city in the States. Alex obviously is more than meets the eye, seeing as how he's been on the run from various governments for who knows how long, and the fact that he's in one piece goes to show just how well he can handle himself. Grim is a nasty old bastard that I would not want to face in a fist fight, magic or not. Beware the old man in a profession where men die young.

"Jonah is a Pacific Mage. Those guys specialize in strength enhancement spells. He's also built like a steel brick. Getting him to move when he plants himself would take far more effort than can be supplied by the rest of the men on this ship combined."

"And Sam?" Lara snapped at me, and I narrowed my eyes, getting her to visibly back down a bit.

"Sam is a black belt in Shaolin Kung Fu, or at least, she was when she was a child." I explained, and when a surprised look crossed Lara's face, I wondered if that was something my second apprentice had never told my first about. "Add in the magic enhancement, the fitness regime I've put her on, and her still ingrained reflexes, I'd be more worried about her killing the men by accident than them being able to hurt her."

Lara seemed to have a hard time swallowing that concept, before she visibly shook the thought away, and tentatively asked another question.

"And me?" she asked, stepping into my personal space. It took me a moment to process the question, simply because those eyes that I had once thought as merely "brown" were closer to hazel and chestnut with flecks of gold scattered throughout them. They were rather mesmerizing.

"You are a powerful witch with survival magic." I said slowly. "You have an unnatural penchant for fire that I've never seen outside of those with Veela heritage, and God help whoever deserves your righteous fury, let alone your vengeance. You are smart, brave, and a veritable force of nature, even before you delve into your magic.

I tilted my head slightly, and smirked before I continued.

"Besides, you're rather beautiful, I'd like to think those brutes wouldn't harm your pretty face just because they were mad at me."

She stared at me wide eyed, and her entire face went red.

"Now then," I said, ignoring her spluttering, and thanking my Occlumency and minor talent with metamorphing for hiding my own blush. "How far have you gotten into–"

 **And that's a thing. Honestly, while I understand killing off the crew of the Endurance from a narrative stand point, I feel like they were just… killed way too easily. The Solarii are mentally unbalanced, they're malnourished, and more importantly, they've come to expect a lot of crews that just roll over and die. And with the way that Roth is portrayed, I think he'd have a crew of far tougher men, willing to throw down at a moment's notice. Roth doesn't strike me as having a crew of pansies, though I think he would temper that by having several people who have both intelligence, and common sense. People who could take the situation of Yamatai, and respond to it in a manner that will keep them all alive.**

 **So, taking that into account, I'm going to have the Endurance Crew live a fair bit longer. Not saying they'll survive Yamatai, but they'll last longer than a mere twenty four hours.**

 **As always, review! Love to see everyone's reviews! Even if it pisses me off and send me on a rant, like I did in the AN at the top.**


	9. Ch 9 Entering the Dragon's Triangle

**Hello, y'all. So, this chapter is actually pretty damned short, in comparison to pretty much all of the other chapters. Not even a thousand words. In any case, some of my reviewers were concerned that I'm having Lara and Sam breeze through the Hogwarts curriculum and learning all the spells way too fast, and way too easily.**

 **I don't necessarily disagree, but my reasoning is fairly simple. 1) Sam and Lara are actually** _ **wanting**_ **to learn this stuff, which means they're going to try harder than most of the Hogwarts students we see in canon. 2) They're adults, with fully developed reasoning and critical thinking skills, variably mastered memorization techniques, and the teacher:student ration is 1:2 rather than 1:20 as seen in canon. Far more one-on-one teaching than Hogwarts can provide, which means more time making sure the individual students understand the work. 3) Harry's not actually trying to get them to** _ **master**_ **seven years worth of spells in six months. He's making sure they can cast the spell a couple of times before moving on to the next one, as fast as they're able. As such, despite their adult minds, thinking skills, and memorization techniques, they've probably already forgotten a good quarter to a third of the spells Harry's taught them. Besides which, if** _ **he**_ **hasn't used it since he was taught the spell originally in Hogwarts, do you really think he's going to make them learn it when he could teach them some minor spell or trick with their magic that will let them survive what he thinks is going to be one of his usual shit-shows? I think not. Now, I've nearly doubled my word count for this chapter by accident, so I'll stop here.**

I was reading on the couch in the common room of Harry's suit case when all the men of the _Endurance_ came thundering down into it.

"We're fifty miles from the line marking out the Dragon's Triangle." Roth said, coming up to me. "Harry's magicked the ship to keep up a straight course, and then he sealed his room. He's sitting on the bunk until we hit the wards around Yamatai."

I nodded.

Wards weren't something Harry had gone over in detail with me and Sam yet, it was apparently a deep and varied subject that required a deeper understanding of various subjects and spells than we currently had. What I did know, was that it was essentially an area where a spell, charm, or curse took effect, no matter what, unless special preparations were made to counteract the ward in question.

Despite all the progress Sam and I had made, I still felt useless. Accelerated curriculum or not, Sam and I were both far behind our age group as far as magical experience and dexterity went, and probably would for years to come. As such, we couldn't really help out at all until Harry deemed us capable of doing so.

About an hour and a half later, I looked up as I felt… _something_ pass over me, tugging at my magic, the charms Harry had embedded in me, and pushing at the magic that made up the suit case.

"Do you feel that?"

It took me a moment to realize that Sam had asked the question, and then I nodded, not sure how to respond. Then a wave of warmth washed over me, and it almost felt like I drowned in Harry's magic, as it pushed up against the foreign magic, and I felt it recoil a bit, before seeming to flee.

Sam, Jonah, and I were breathing like we'd just run a marathon, and I didn't realize that Harry was by my side until I felt his hand rubbing my back.

"We're in." He said. "I expect an exceptionally powerful storm soon, Himiko might even go out of her way to whip up a storm to end all storms."

"Can you do anything about it?" I heard Roth ask.

"No." I heard Harry say, and grimaced at the groaning from the crew. "It's not because I don't have enough power, I've got that in spades, the fact of the matter is that I don't know what enchantment Himiko is using, and without knowing that, I can't use a counter enchantment. If I use the wrong one, it'll be like throwing water on a grease fire, only my magic will be absorbed as fuel, and make the storm _worse_. I could possibly set off a bomb in the perfectly balanced natural ecosystem of the world, creating storms that cover the planet, and feed off of each other, reducing humanity to a few paranoid people who live in geologically stable areas, underground."

I sat back on my haunches after finally catching my breath, before turning to look at my Master.

"That was you letting go, wasn't it?" I asked him directly.

His eyes met mine, and then he nodded.

"That was crazy." Sam said. "That was an absolutely insane amount of magic."

"Remind me to never piss you off, Mr. Potter." Jonah said, one hand over his heart.

"Noted." Harry smirked at the New Zealander. Then he sighed, and helped me back onto the couch. "And now, we wait for the storm to ground us on Yamatai."

With that, we sunk down, and I pulled my tome back into my lap to continue reading.

"It's going to be a long night." Harry said next to me, and I smirked as he laid his head back. I jumped a few minutes later, when I heard snoring escape him, and a cursory glance showed that I wasn't the only one staring at him incredulously. Only Roth and Reyes seemed unfazed, and I think that was mostly because they seemed intent on following Harry's example.

After a few hours, the boredom got to me, along with the adrenaline crash after Harry'd gotten me going when he'd let go of his control of his magic. I fell asleep, leaning up against him, with Sam leaning against my other side, her arms around my waist.

It was the best sleep I'd get for the next couple of weeks.

 **So, that was decent, wasn't it? Like I said, incredibly short chapter, but this was where I felt it was best to cut it off. Leave a review please!**


	10. Ch 10 Beheading the Serpent

**Howdy ya'll. Yes, I'm originally from the South, so I** _ **can**_ **, in fact, say that. Anywho, here's the next installment. Also, have any of you played Shadow of the Tomb Raider?**

 **No spoilers, but it's SO DAMNED GOOD! I'm about three quarters of the way through, I'm taking my time because I'm a completionist, so I'm trying to get 100% my first time through, and I'm** _ **not**_ **looking for walkthroughs, so don't even suggest it.**

 **Now, on to reviews, I'll say this: I'm not putting POV titles at the top of my chapters/the various POV changes in chapters, if there are any. If you've read any adult novels, you'll have noticed that POV changes don't have "So-and-so's POV" with every POV change. If you're having that hard of a time keeping up with whose POV the chapter/section is, then you might be too young to be reading an M-rated story. Just saying.**

 **To Guest: Animagus form, you'll find out. Sam's not dying. She doesn't die in the game or comics, so unless my muse decides to completely fuck everything, Sam's not dying. And I'll probably just continue with this one story, not make it into a series of stories.**

 **To Hadrian le fay: Don't go spoiling things! And you're wrong about the Animagus form.s**

 **Other than that, I got nothing, so just enjoy the chapter!**

I jerked awake, my perimeter wards alerting me to the fact that there were hostile humans boarding the _Endurance_. Looking down, I realized that Lara's head was resting on my chest, and she was drooling on me. A minor levitation charm allowed me to rise before I allowed her to slump onto the couch, a drying spell taking care of the wet on my shirt, and a cleaning charm getting rid of the residue allowing me to look around.

Only Grim was awake, and he was eyeing me carefully.

"Hostiles just boarded the ship." I said quietly. "I'll not be long, taking care of them."

He nodded, and I summoned a dragonhide cloak from my room, throwing it about my shoulders before I stalked up and out of my suit case.

"Where's the bodies?" I heard just outside of my assigned room on the _Endurance_. "Every ship has at least ten bodies of people that never got off before the storms slam it into the island."

It was rough, deep, and definitely had a Russian accent. I wondered why he was speaking English, when I heard an Aussie accented voice respond.

"I dunno, but what I want to know is where all the supplies are." The apparent Aussie sounded aggravated, and I smirked to myself, knowing that all those supplies were exactly in their proper places, just put under a limited aversion ward keyed to anyone not of the _Endurance_.

"Any sign of people or supplies?" A third voice questioned, this one sounding American.

"No."

"Nothing."

"Damn." The American cursed. "Like a fuckin' ghost ship."

Figuring I had enough waiting, I erected a silencing ward around myself and the three men, before transfiguring the floor beneath their feet to tar. That didn't alert them to their impending doom, but then I came around the corner and put a high powered piercing curse directly into each of their foreheads, faint squelching sounds the only result of the silently cast, wandless curses.

Working quickly, I levitated them out of the tar, transfigured it back into the metal deck, divested the men of their weaponry and any currency of any kind they had, and then transfigured the men into stones that I dropped into my cloak's pocket. Their weapons I dropped into Hagrid's moleskin pouch around my neck after shrinking them to fit through the opening, and knew that if all the men on the ship had weaponry, I'd have to rework the extension charm on it to allow for more storage space. It was already quite full.

Disillusioning myself, I applied scent erasing and sound muffling charms to myself and my boots respectively, and then carefully stalked down the corridor. The men seemed to mostly travel in twos and threes, and after I'd killed three dozen men and pocketed three dozen stones, the men I started encountering were particularly edgy, noticing that patrols and workers weren't showing up when they were supposed to. Those ones had itchy trigger fingers on rifles and shotguns, nocked arrows on bows, and pulled katanas and machettes out of their sheathes before I got to them.

It didn't help them at all.

I was coming up the final ladder well to the deck of the _Endurance_ when I paused to listen.

"Father Mathias!" I heard a Russian accented man exclaim. "Something's wrong! All the men are disappearing on this ship, and there's no crew or supplies on board! And nobody has washed up on shore on the island since the last ship was wrecked here."

"I see."

I felt my lip curl as this "Father" Mathias's voice poured grease down my neck, as if someone had taken the grease of Snape's hair, and made it into an audible thing. Judging by the way the other man deferred to him, he must be the one in charge of this operation to steal our stuff. I'd have to take him prisoner and get him to point us towards the leader of this cult.

" _Lumos solem_." I incanted quietly, stepping out of the ladder well, shutting my eyes and covering them with my left hand, while my right hand threw out a highly over powered Solar Light Charm. I followed it with a highly over powered Cannon Blast Charm a split second later, using magic to muffle the sound to my own ears, and then I looked up after my makeshift flash-bang went off, and magicked weapons and currency off all the men before stunning them all.

I walked to one man, rolled him over, and dove into his mind.

When I came out about a half hour later, I sent a piercing curse into the man's head in disgust.

Apparently, Father Mathias was the cult leader, and there were over five hundred men on this island, guarding important sites and relics all over it. One of those things being the body of an ancient priestess that contained Himiko's soul. Walking around to all the other thugs, I put piercing curses in all of their heads, transfigured them into stones, and dropped them in my pocket. I left Mathias alone, but mostly because I only wanted to keep him alive. The number of young women who had been burned at the stake just since the thug I'd interrogated had been here was staggering. And sickening.

But even more sickening, was the process of dehumanization and desensitization that Mathias put all the men through. Forced cannibalism, passive-aggressive murder of anyone who didn't fall in with Mathias's plans and cult… It was sickening.

Casting an _Incarcerous_ on the man, I transfigured the constricting rope into constricting chains midway through the conjuring, before casting a _levicorpus_. I left him in place, and began making my way back through the ship to my suit case.

' _It's going to be a long expedition.'_ I thought to myself.

 **And that's all folks! Another short one, I'm sorry, but we'll start getting meatier chapters soon, don't you worry! Review please!**


	11. Ch 11 Interrogations and Investigations

**Well, sorry this one is a little late people. Work has kicked into overdrive in preparation for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years, and I'm working nearly sixty hours every week, and on top of that, two of my grandparents ended up in the hospital this past weekend. My mom is flying out to them, so I'll be staying home to take care of my little sister and the family dog, so I might get to write some more, depending on how things go.**

 **I forget what all is in this chapter, I haven't reread it like I normally do, and I don't really have time to respond to pertinent reviews like I normally do since I'm on lunch at work, but I hope you appreciate the chapter. Review please!**

I woke with a gasp.

There was magic roiling through the air, and it was tainted by what I could only guess to be utter fury.

"That's a lot of magic." I heard Jonah gasp next to me.

"No shit!" Sam said from somewhere around my waist.

When Master walked into the suit case, my stomach was somewhere in my feet.

"We got lucky." He said, some of the crew waking at his stomping boots. "There is a cult here, but the head nutcase was on the boat looking for dead crewmen. I took the men out, and have the head cultist unconscious and bound up on the deck."

He paused.

"Kill first, ask no questions." He said, looking pointedly at me and Sam. "There are a form of Inferi on this island. Head Nut isn't in control of them, they seem to be mostly autonomous, though my guess is that Himiko's soul is the puppeteer pulling the magical strings."

"We're coming with you, right?" Jonah asked, and I noticed how utterly pale his normally darker skin was.

"Only if you want." Master said.

"I'm coming with you, Master." I said, forcing myself to swallow back my fear and apprehension as I stood up.

"As am I, Master." Sam said, standing next to me.

He looked at us, and then nodded.

"We're with you, Mr. Potter." Jonah said, and that was when I noticed Alex, Roth, and Reyes standing next to him, all of them outfitted with pistols, in addition to a sniper rifle in Roth's case, and a shotgun in Jonah's.

"… Very well." Harry said. "Sam, Lara, with me, the rest of you, I'll call you up onto the deck when I'm ready for you."

Sam and I exchanged glances before we followed Harry up and out of the suit case. When we got to the top deck of the _Endurance_ , I saw a man, bound in chains, and suspended upside down in mid air, which Harry was… _stalking_ towards, purpose clear in the set of his shoulders. An _Ennervate_ hit the man, followed quickly by a _Langlock_ , to keep him from yelling at us. It didn't stop him from trying though, given by the muffled yelling emitting from his open mouth.

"Shut up." Harry snapped. "You gave up any rights you might've once had decades ago."

A hiss seemed to escape my Master, reminding me of an enormous snake for some reason, before he continued.

" _Imperio!_ " he intoned darkly, and I felt a spike of magic that numbed my mind swirl around us, before apparently slamming into the cultist with all the gentleness of a hundred kilometer per hour lorry hitting him solely in the face.

"Gather all your men to Himiko's body." Master commanded. "Abandon all posts, you've found the Key."

Stepping closer, up behind Master, I realized that the cultist's eyes were dulled, cloudy, and unfocused.

For a moment, all was silent, and then the cultist nodded.

The oppressive magic withdrew, and Harry waved a hand negligently, vanishing the chains, undoing the Tongue Locker, and cancelling the levitation charm. The cultist dropped to the ground and didn't move for a moment.

"Function like you normally would, but obey my previous instructions." Harry snapped, and the cultist scrambled to his feet. Feet that I only just noticed were bare. They were covered in old scars, and the funky look in the cultist's eyes was gone, replaced by an ugly sneer as he leered at me and Sam.

"Attention, all units." The cultist sneered into the radio he pulled from his waist. "This is Mathias. I've found the Key on the latest ship to come in. Everyone is to pull back to the Monastery, and prepare the ritual for completion. Our Queen, will set us _free_."

There were affirmatives given in several different languages, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, English, Spanish, Portugeuse, French, and several more that I couldn't identify, but Harry, Roth, and the now-named Mathias seemed to understand them all.

"Quite the eclectic work force you have." Harry commented coldly.

"All are loyal Solarii." Mathias's voice was like grease between my shoulder blades, and made me suppress a shudder of revulsion. I was suddenly wishing for a shirt that covered me more. Maybe that would save me from exposure to this slimy git. "They follow my orders without question, those that do, I kill immediately."

"Shut up." Harry snapped. If gazes could kill, I don't think there would've been so much as an ash _left_ of Mathias with the way Harry was glaring at him. "We'll wait here an hour so that your… cult… can get most of the way to this Monastery you sent them to."

"It will take until nightfall for the last of my minions to reach the valley the Monastery is in." Mathias interjected. "Sunrise tomorrow will guarantee the full _might_ of the Solarii is within the Monastery."

"Then sleep." Harry said, and Mathias's eyes rolled back as he collapsed to the deck.

The deck of the _Endurance_ was silent for a moment, before Jonah spoke.

"Mr. Potter… The _Imperius_ …" he trailed off, uncertainty clear in his voice.

"I have special permission to use whatever legal and illegal charms, spells, hexes, jinxes, and curses I find necessary to discharge my duties, Mr. Maiava." Harry stated in a dead voice, glaring up at the highest peak of the island. "Duties that the ICW has allowed me to perform simply because I would do it anyways. Britain isn't the only magical community to practically worship the ground I walk on because I defeated Voldemort, and if I said that they were getting in the way of me preventing another Voldemort, or Grindlewald, every magical government in the world would be under siege by their citizenry. After my friends published that story of how Voldemort and his Death Eaters took control of the British Ministry of Magic, everyone in the world is looking suspiciously at the government, and would immediately suspect them of being compliant with a new Dark Lord or Lady.

"Even if none of it is true, the sheeple of the magical world wouldn't care, all they want is their heroes and villains." Harry said, crossing his arms. "They determine such by the way the wind blows, unless you're me, Dumbledore, Grindlewald, or Voldemort. Before I defeated Voldemort, I was a hero and savior one day, a delusional brat with visions of grandeur the next. They pretty much worshiped Dumbledore after he defeated the seeming devil incarnate, Grindlewald. They pretty much _do_ worship me, now that I've defeated Voldemort. If I point any fingers, no one's going to question who's telling the truth. I _hate_ using the Unforgivables, but I hate scum like Mathias here far more. I learned the hard way to put down scum like him before he puts down any more of the people I care about.

"… Is he really that bad?" Jonah asked.

I couldn't help but feel a pang of… bitter loneliness and festered pain… but it wasn't mine. Shaking my head, I stepped forward, resting a hand on Harry's shoulder.

"I'd rather see bad people killed for being bad, than to see good people killed because bad people were allowed to run free." I said. "But maybe it would be best if you told us what he's done to force you into using something you detest? That way the rest of us can understand why you're willing to go against your morals when dealing with this man."

I felt two flutters of apprehension, both had a different… flavor, one distinctly reminding me of Sam's favorite _pastel de nata_ , the other reminding me of the full English breakfasts Harry made me eat. I shook the odd sensations off, concentrating for a moment to conjure a group of chairs for the seven of us.

Sam flicked her fingers, and a cage sprang up around Mathias, transfigured out of the deck of the ship, which earned her a glare from Roth.

We were silent for several moments, the sea breeze ruffling my hair, chilling me a bit, despite my higher-than-average body temperature from my survival magic. Sam flicked her fingers at me, and I felt my grey camisole turn into a grey long sleeve shirt that still had a neckline that showed off a tasteful amount of cleavage. I shot her a thankful smile, before turning my attention back to Harry, who seemed to be glaring at something beyond sight.

"… In order to give you context, I have to tell you Voldemort's origins." Harry said after several more moments of silence. "Hogwarts was founded a thousand years ago, by two men, and two women. Women have always been on a more even keel with men in the magical world than in the nonmagical world, due simply to the fact that women can explode something just as well as men. As such, nobody batted an eye when the men claimed that the women were just as talented and powerful as them. Their names, were Godric Gryffindor, Rowena Ravenclaw, Helga Hufflepuff, and Salazar Slytherin. Gryffindor valued bravery, valor, integrity, and chivalry. Ravenclaw valued intelligence, wit, and a desire to always continue learning, and pushing the boundaries of magic with bold new ideas. Hufflepuff valued hard workers, loyalty, and friendship. And Slytherin valued cunning, ambition, and a willingness to abide by the word, but not the spirit of an agreement in order to further said ambitions.

"Slytherin was the template for modern politics." Sam slipped in.

Harry paused, before a smirk flowed over his lips as he nodded in agreement.

"Anyways, while they were alive, they sorted their students into a house that they were the heads of, each student picked by what values they already had, or sought to acquire the most. Gryffindor got the brave, Ravenclaw, the intelligent, Hufflepuff, the hardworking, and Slytherin, the cunning. However, when they were older, they realized that they couldn't keep doing that forever, and so, they enchanted Gryffindor's hat to delve into the minds of new students, and divine what values they already had, or valued the most, to sort them into the proper house. Students could request to go into a house different from the one that they Sorting Hat wanted to put them in, but that's kind of rare.

"However, in those days, nonmagical-born students were coming to Hogwarts completely illiterate, meaning that the teachers were having to spend extra time teaching them to read and write. This, of course, slowed down the learning of magic, which Slytherin was against. He wanted to build a prep school, one that was explicitly meant to teach young magicals who were born to nonmagical parents, how to read and write. The other founders were recalcitrant to the idea, thinking that it would alienate the nonmagical born from the magical born students. It was the one issue they disagreed on.

"Eventually, Slytherin left the other three Founders, upset that they were against him teaching nonmagical born students to read and write before Hogwarts, so that more magic could be taught.

"However, the Founders built their own private hide-aways inside the castle. Slytherin's is perhaps the most infamous, and Ravenclaw's is the worst kept secret this side of Atlantis. While they were still a cohesive whole, Slytherin built a chamber underneath the school to house a Class Five X predator magical beast. A basilisk. Fully matured, merely meeting its gaze will instantly kill you, it's venom is the most potent poison _ever_ , capable of corroding metal in seconds, and it's hide is even more magic resistant than a dragon's. Add onto that, they never stop growing, and no one is sure if they have a natural lifespan, and you have the apex predator to end all apex predators. The four Founder's agreed to place the basilisk within the chamber, as a last defense for the students against forces of darkness.

Harry paused, and I wondered if he was going to go through a thousand years of history for us before getting to why he was willing to break his morals when dealing with Mathias.

"Now, here comes the convoluted part." He finally said.

"Oh good, I was wondering when that would happen." Sam snipped with a small smirk on her face.

"Be careful what you wish for." Harry intoned, and I couldn't help but lean forward to listen more carefully. "Near as I can tell, some students that belonged to Slytherin overheard him arguing with the other Founders about nonmagical born students coming to Hogwarts. They apparently misheard, or misinterpreted the argument, and extrapolated that Slytherin didn't want nonmagical born witches and wizards, that they were an affront to purebloods, magicals that had magical parents and magical grandparents, and magical great-grandparents. Something that Slytherin, incidentally, had. For some reason, a vast majority of the ambitious, were purebloods, and they believed that Slytherin thought purebloods better than muggleborns, nonmagical-born witches and wizards.

"After Slytherin left, Slytherin House believed it was because the other Founders didn't believe that purebloods were better, and that Slytherin had left a monster in the Chamber of Secrets. That he left it there for when his Heir returned to the school to purge it of nonmagical-borns. The story became legend, became myth, until nineteen forty three, when there was a rash of unexplainable petrifications, and one death.

"But, in order to understand _that_ , we need to back up about two decades." Harry smirked. "As the time and generations went by, the lines of Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin faded into obscurity, though a few pureblood houses claimed to be descended from one of the four Founders. One such line, was the House of Gaunt, who claimed to be able to trace their ancestry all the way to Salazar himself. However, due to their obsession with keeping their blood pure, they rarely married farther away than second cousins, and brothers and sisters marrying and having children was rather common in their family.

"They bred themselves into extinction." I muttered, bewildered by the concept Harry was talking of. "That's… insane."

"That's common." Harry shrugged. "In magical Britain at least. Everyone's related to everyone somehow. My godfather's great aunt was my father's mother. The family tree in magical Britain is more like a family web. Anyways, there was more to the Gaunt family's inbreeding than mere stupidity. They started squibbing out."

"Squibbing?" Reyes asked.

"It's when a nonmagical child is born to magical parents." Jonah said, and I tried to wrap my mind around that concept. Harry and Jonah had made it seem like magicals only ever gave birth to magicals. And here they were, talking about nonmagical children being born to magical parents. It was making me rethink everything I thought I knew about the magical world so far. "It's rare, but having a squib is considered to be a great disgrace. In certain parts of the world, squibs are killed. In others, the child is abandoned. Nobody wants a squib child."

"Yeah." Harry nodded. "However, in the nineteen twenties, the last daughter of the House of Gaunt, Merope Gaunt, fell in love with a nonmagical Lord, Lord Tom Riddle. Riddle wasn't interested in her, due to the fact that she wasn't very attractive to him, so she dosed him with _Amortentia_ , a love potion. He married her, and she became pregnant with his child. After she was certain of the pregnancy, she took him off the love potion, believing him to now love her on his own, simply because she had his progeny within her. Instead, he ran away from her, leaving her to raise her child on her own. Only, she died after naming their child Tom Marvolo Riddle, after giving birth to him.

"Tom Riddle Junior was sent to an orphanage, where he was bullied, and in turn, bullied everyone else using controlled accidental magic." Harry leaned back in his chair, running a hand through his hair. "When he was eleven, the Transfiguration professor at Hogwarts went to collect Tom Riddle from the Wool Orphanage. However, the Transfiguration professor, Dumbledore, felt that there was something evil about Tom Riddle.

"He was right." Jonah said.

"Very." Harry sighed.

"The first five years of Tom Riddle's education, he was a model student, straight O's, teacher's pet, the works." Harry drawled. "But, like Dumbledore suspected, he was evil, and used his charm and wit to get access to the Restricted Section of the Hogwarts library. There, he learned about ways to extend his life. You see, Riddle was terrified of dying. That, even with all the power that magic gives us, that he would still die. So, he was willing to do anything to never die. Including splitting his soul.

"That sounds horrible." Reyes deadpanned.

"It is." Harry frowned. "In order to split your soul, you have to remorselessly kill an innocent person. There's more to it than that, but I don't want the knowledge of how to do it to get around. However, in 1943, towards the end of his sixth year at Hogwarts, he used the basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets to kill a fourth year girl, Myrtle Warren. And with that, he split his soul in half, and stuck half of it in a diary that he had been using since he came to Hogwarts, and enchanted it to be damn near indestructible. So, at age sixteen, he had half his soul in his body, and half his soul in a diary that he locked away for several years while he went on a sabbatical around the world, after he left school, learning all and every evil spell, curse, hex, jinx, you name it, if it was evil, he learned it.

"When he got back to England, he began working in Knockturn Alley, the bad side of Diagon, in a store called Borgin and Burke's, where they sell anything for the right price. While he was there, he encountered a woman, Hepzibah Smith, very rich, and old. She let slip that she had a couple of objects belonging to the Founders, and Riddle began working his charm, going to visit her every so often, learning about her, her life, until she trusted him enough to show him her two most valuable possessions. The first, was Helga Hufflepuff's Cup, enchanted by the Founder to increase the potency of whatever liquid was put into it. The second item, was Salazar Slytherin's Locket.

"Riddle killed Smith for the Locket, didn't he?" Roth asked, though I could tell it wasn't a question, so much as a demand for confirmation.

"And the Cup." Harry said, leaning forward, pointing at my old mentor. "Riddle believed himself to be the greatest wizard ever. Common, everyday objects would not sate his ego. So, he killed Hepzibah Smith, splitting his soul again and putting the new fragment into the Cup, and again, enchanting it to hell and back. He went and killed someone, nobody knows who, and turned the Locket into another horcrux. He got away with killing Smith by modifying her house-elf's memory to believe that she accidentally put poison into Smith's drink. Seeing as how the elf was elderly herself, she was believed, and executed.

"Riddle disappeared. For ten years, he wandered the world again, and began using the alias Lord Voldemort openly."

Here, Harry paused, and used a spell to write "Tom Marvolo Riddle" in letters of fire, before waving his hand, and rearranging the letters to spell "I am Lord Voldemort", showing us how the megalomaniac presented himself.

"Then, he suddenly came back to England again, and went to Hogwarts to attempt to gain the position of Defense Against the Dark Arts professor. At this point, Dumbledore was now the Headmaster, and refused to give Riddle the post, due to the fact that Riddle had never, and obviously still wasn't, interested in teaching. As such, Riddle was denied, and before he left the castle, he did two things: first, he took Ravenclaw's Diadem, and hid it in Rowena Ravenclaw's personal hide-away, the Room of Requirement, in its configuration of the Room of Lost and Hidden things, believing that it would be safe there, and that nobody would find it. After all, almost a thousand years' worth of student junk and miscellany, anything could get lost in that."

Harry paused, a look of fond remembrance on his face, before Sam snapped him out of it.

"So… what was the second thing he did before he left Hogwarts?" she asked.

"He set a curse on the Defense Against the Dark Arts position, that whatever professor took the post, would never be able to last more than a year in the position." Harry grimaced. "There was a pattern of death, life-altering crippling injury, and disgrace that took the position. Each Defense professor either died, had something horrendous happen to them that forced them to retire, or had some event uncovered or discovered that shamed them into deserting the post. In my first year, I ended up killing the Defense professor by accident while he was possessed by Voldemort's shade. In my second year, my best friend's wand was broken, but seeing as his family is on the poor side, they couldn't afford him a new wand right away. So he had to make do with a faulty wand that was as likely to backfire any spell onto him, as it was to harm someone he didn't want to. His younger sister was taken into the Chamber after she was possessed by Riddle's diary, after it was slipped into her things during school shopping by one of Riddle's Yes-men, Lucius Malfoy. Ron and I found out that Lockhart was a fraud when we found him packing to leave after the other professors expected him to go into the Chamber to save Ginny. We found the entrance to the Chamber, got down into it, and then when the fraud pretended to faint, we kind of dropped our guards. Then he snatched Ron's wand and turned it on us.

"Something went wrong, didn't it?" Reyes smirked.

"Lockhart was a fraud because he wrote books that portrayed him as being better than Merlin and Dumbledore combined, saying that he'd done things that are certifiably impossible with magic, and then he convinced his publisher to dose all of the books with a mild attraction potion keyed to him. Every female who bought one was infatuated with the git, so none of them really thought to question any of his actions. Us guys just didn't care. But anyways, Lockhart stole Ron's wand, and then tried using _Obliviate_ on us so that he could claim the credit for killing the basilisk, if he actually planned on it or not, I don't know, and then he could write a story about how Ron and I's minds shattered upon seeing Ginny's body. That was how he wrote those books. He traveled the world, looking for fantastical stories where someone did something impossible, and then, after he got the story, he _obliviated_ them, replaced 'them' with 'me' and 'I' in the story, and got them published. Made himself rich and famous that way.

"When he cast the spell, Ron's wand backfired so badly that it slammed Lockhart into a weak spot in the Chamber, which caused a cave in. When all was said and done, Lockhart had reverted to, essentially, a five year old that didn't know about magic. I went and ended up killing the basilisk, and destroying the diary horcrux without knowing what it was at the time.

"In my third year, my teacher was an old friend of my parents." Harry blew out a breath, and I could tell it was from exasperation. "Remus Lupin was a werewolf, bitten by a rather evil werewolf when he was a child, named Fenrir Greyback. He was completely terrified of his disease, and so when Dumbledore assured him that I was safe, he took off, and never looked back after he found out that my parents were dead, one of his friends was dead, and my godfather was accused but never convicted of betraying my parents to Voldemort at the end of the war.

"In my fourth year, our professor was captured and impersonated for the whole year by a Death Eater thought long dead, while the actual professor was locked in his own trunk the entire time.

"We get the idea." Reyes interrupted. "Now what about these horcruxes of Riddles?"

"Ah, yes." Harry grimaced. "Where was I?"

"Riddle had just come back for the Defense position, was turned down, place the diadem of Ravenclaw in her hidey hole, and laid the curse on the position he wanted." Sam smiled.

"Yes, well, after that, Riddle started gathering followers, after first scrubbing his normal name from the history books, save at Hogwarts. He began spouting pureblood dogma, drawing purebloods to him, because they had the political power, and the money to support his desire to kill every nonmagical person in the world.

"Of course, there was another horcrux that was difficult to find out about, it was the Gaunt Head of House Ring. He hid it in the Gaunt shack, which was what the Gaunt family had reduced itself to by the time there was only his mother and maternal uncle left. He framed his uncle for killing his father, and paternal grandparents, and in doing so, created the fifth horcrux, the Gaunt Ring that he stole from his uncle.

"Wait." I said, frowning as I tried to figure out the math. "He put half his soul in the diary, right?"

"Yes." Harry nodded.

"Then that means that he only had a quarter of his soul left after he split it in half to put it in the locket, and an eighth of his soul to put in the cup, and a sixteenth of his soul to put in the diadem, meaning that he had one thirty secondth of his soul to put in the Gaunt Ring." I said, using my fingers to keep track of it all. "Didn't that destabilize the hell out of the remnant of his soul in his body?"

"Yes." Harry smirked. "He started taking on snake features, a flattened nose, red, slit eyes, pale skin, no lips… honestly, he gave up the handsomeness he had in exchange for a rather ugly appearance that he thought would strike fear into the hearts of his enemies. Eventually, it did, but that's neither here nor there.

"For almost a decade, Voldemort gathered followers, his Death Eaters, and they began going on a rampage, killing nonmagicals with impunity, and killing halfblood, that is, a person with one magical born parent, and one nonmagical born parent. They also began killing off the pureblood houses that did not agree with Voldemort. The Death Eaters reduced a lot of lines to single heirs, even causing a few to go extinct.

"Now, I told you about how Voldemort came after me because of a prophecy that one of his minions only partial heard before getting thrown out of the building," Harry said. "What I didn't tell you is what happened besides Voldemort getting disembodied. As you said, Lara, Riddle's soul was highly unstable, but numbers are powerful, when it comes to magic. Including himself, there were only six fragments of Riddle's soul, and he wanted seven, a _very_ powerful magical number. So, he prepped his soul to be split once more before he came to my parents' house, ready to kill me. He killed my parents without trouble, but my mother had set up a very powerful form of sacrificial blood ward upon me, cutting a small symbol of protection into my forehead.

Harry blew out a breath, leaning back once again as he ran a hand through his hair, a nervous habit that I had figured out, going by how much he was doing it throughout this little history lesson.

"The protection would take the energy of whatever spell was cast at it, and send it back at the caster, provided that the protection's creator, my mother, willingly sacrificed themselves to save the protectee, in this case, me. Voldemort used the Killing Curse on both my parents, and then tried to use it again on me. Because of mum's sacrifice, the blood ward was running at full power in the minute between Voldemort killing her, and killing me.

"The Curse rebounded, destroyed Voldemort's body, and all you had to show for it was a scar on your forehead." Jonah said quietly, drawing all our attention to him. "It's known throughout the world, but it was always made out to be something that _you_ did, like some kind of special power you have. I never believed it, so thank you. Thank you for trusting us with the truth of this matter."

We all nodded, before I looked carefully at Harry, a sense of relief sweeping through me that wasn't my own.

' _I need to figure out what the hell that is.'_ I thought to myself, before shaking the thought off, and listening again to Harry as he spoke.

"After Voldemort was disembodied, the Death Eaters broke. If Voldemort had successfully killed me, then magical Britain would've fallen within months, if not days." He said. "Instead, most of the Inner Circle Death Eaters, Voldemort's loyal lieutenants, threw gold at the government, and then claimed to be under the Imperius Curse the entire war. They were excused, but the common folk knew it was all a lie, but everybody in power wanted to put the war behind them as quickly as possible. Only the ones to gladly continue lauding Voldemort and what he'd done were imprisoned.

"Looking at their list of crimes, they all would've been summarily executed in the nonmagical world." There was a muscle twitching in Harry's jaw, and I idly wondered just what those crimes _were_. "Instead, they merely got life sentences around Dementors, horrible monsters that suck all the happiness out of you, and if you let one get close enough to you, they Kiss you, and suck your soul right out of your mouth, leaving your body a soulless husk, unthinking, unfeeling. But even while they are sucking out all your positive emotions, they begin forcing you to relive your worst memories, and feed on your despair as well. Those are the guards at Azkaban Prison, and they have a tendency to drive everyone insane.

"In my fourth year, Voldemort got himself a new body, but not before intentionally splitting his soul _again_ , into a Reticulated Python. He never knew that, when his body was destroyed, his destabilized soul split in half, and the soul fragment landed in the protection symbol carved onto my forehead. The blood ward was weakened after the hit with the Killing Curse, and so, the fragment was allowed to stay in my scar, even though the blood ward prevented it from taking over my body. At that point, there were seven fragments of Voldemort's soul in the world, though he thought there were only six. Which is why he split it again when he was able to, and put the newest fragment into his snake, Nagini.

"Wait, that means that he only had one one hundred twenty eighth of his soul left in his body." I exclaimed, running the math quickly. "How did he survive?"

"I don't know." Harry shook his head. "Sheer stubbornness? Either way, Voldemort didn't know about the soul fragment in my scar. In my seventh year, I never returned to Hogwarts, instead, Ron, Hermione, and I went on a camping trip, trying to find the horcruxes. We found out that the Locket had been stolen by my godfather's brother, who, in a moment of moral clarity, stole, and attempted to destroy, the Locket horcrux. He failed, and died, but his house elf, Kreacher, kept trying to destroy it until we promised to fulfill his oath to Regulus to destroy the Locket. However, we were unable to. There are really only two foolproof methods of destroying a horcrux. You have to destroy the container it is in, and the only way to do that, is to either Fiendfyre it, or stab it with something coated in basilisk venom.

"So, you couldn't destroy the Locket because…?" I trailed off.

"Fiendfyre summons Hellfire. It is damn near sentient, and will burn anything magical first before it moves on to anything else, and it's damned near impossible to stop." Harry glared at me. "Summoning it is both a power-hog, and incredibly precise, and on top of all that, you have to use all your concentration to keep it from turning and killing you first. None of us were willing to risk it. However, we knew of a way to safely destroy it with basilisk venom, however, we didn't have access to the item in question.

"And what _is_ this item in question?" Sam asked.

"The sword of Godric Gryffindor." Harry said. "It's made of Goblin Steel, and that which doesn't destroy it, becomes a part of it. Seeing as how I killed the basilisk by stabbing it through the roof of its mouth, through the venom sac, and into the brain, the sword absorbed the basilisk venom into the blade. However, the minion that overheard the prophecy, became Dumbledore's double agent, and, after he killed Dumbledore, he became the Headmaster of Hogwarts under Voldemort's rule, and did everything he could to keep the students from being outright killed, but he couldn't keep them from being tortured as punishment. So, he took Gryffindor's sword, had a replica made, and kept the replica in his office before dropping the sword somewhere I would find it.

"Of course, the sword was at the bottom of a deep pond, in December, with ice on top of the pond." Harry paused to shake his head, a grimace twisting his lips. "My friends and I thought it a good idea to _wear_ the damned Locket, in order to limit its influence on us. It made us irritable, downright violent. Ron ended up leaving me and Hermione, so Hermione and I continued on by ourselves. However, I was wearing the Locket when I dove into the water, _towards_ the thing it knew could kill it. It damn near strangled me, and it was only Ron managing to find his way back, who saved me. Then he dove in for the sword, got it, and I let him kill the Locket. After that, we discovered where the Cup was, in a vault in Gringotts Bank, in one of Voldemort's most fanatical follower's vault.

"We ended up having to escape on dragon-back." Harry shook his head, smiling. "The Goblins still haven't forgiven me for that, even if my pocketbook has repaired all the damage I caused.

"At this point, there were four horcruxes destroyed, and–"

"Wait, four?" Reyes asked. "I only heard three destroyed so far. The diary, the Locket, and the Cup. What's number four?"

"Ah, right, sorry," Harry apologized. "Before my sixth year, Dumbledore found the Gaunt Shack, and found and destroyed the Gaunt Ring, however, he was struck by a Withering Curse set on the ring. So, that's four down, and only Ravenclaw's Diadem, myself, and Nagini as the only things keeping Voldemort tied to this world.

"However, here's the thing, we didn't know that the Diadem _was_ the horcrux, we only knew that it was something belonging to Ravenclaw because, until I pulled Gryffindor's sword out of the Sorting Hat, nobody had seen it in centuries, maybe even since the time that Gryffindor was alive. So, we knew that the sword couldn't be a horcrux, which left only something of Ravenclaw's. It took talking to the ghost of her daughter at Hogwarts to figure out what it could've been, but then we were told that it was probably Ravenclaw's _Lost_ Diadem. I had to finagle the story out of Helena Ravenclaw, Ravenclaw's daughter's ghost, only to find out that Helena had stolen her mother's Diadem, and taken it with her as she fled to what is now Albania, pursued by her admirer. She hid the Diadem in a hollow tree, and when she refused to accompany her admirer, he killed her, in a fit of rage, before taking his own life in a fit of horror and regret.

"Riddle had charmed Helena into revealing the location of the Diadem, and we were terrified that we would have to travel to Albania to find it, only to hear her say that she had seen Riddle take it into the Room of Requirement. It was at that point that I remembered seeing the Diadem, only I thought it was just another piece of junk the year before, when I was in the Room of Lost and Hidden things.

"We'd lost the sword in Gringotts, so after Ron, Hermione, and I retrieved the Diadem, they went to the Chamber of Secrets, and used one of the basilisk's teeth to destroy the horcrux in it.

"At that point, Voldemort called for a ceasefire for us to collect our dead, for two hours, and _promised_ ," I could hear the scorn in his voice, and felt a roiling pit of anger in my stomach, because it painted a picture of what it actually meant. I decided I didn't like it. "That he wouldn't kill anyone else if I surrendered to him. Ron, Hermione, and I snuck away, found Voldemort confronting Snape, the then Headmaster, before Voldemort had Nagini kill Snape. Snape, using his last breath, gave me a series of memories that helped to explain his actions over the years.

"He was the one who told my mum she was a witch when they were both children. They were friends growing up, and even though Mum was sorted into Gryffindor, and Snape into Slytherin, they stayed friends. All the way up until fifth year, when Snape started falling into the crowd of people who became Death Eaters. He called her a mudblood, one of the most derogatory terms you can apply to a nonmagical-born. She broke off her friendship with him then, but he was obsessed with her, calling it love. He was the one who heard the prophecy, but he was thrown out before he heard all of it. He told it to Voldemort, and when he found out that Voldemort intended to kill my parents, he begged and pleaded with Voldemort to spare my mum. Voldemort toyed with Snape, and Snape went to Dumbledore, offering to be his spy inside Voldemort's Inner Circle. After my parents were killed, he swore to do whatever it took to see Voldemort killed.

"It was only after Dumbledore began hunting for horcruxes that Snape figured out why and how Voldemort was still around after being disembodied. Snape also figured out that Dumbledore had known, from the time he dropped me off at my nonmagical relative's house, that there was a soul fragment in my forehead. Dumbledore put me there, thinking that I would be safe. I was essentially raised as a martyristic pig for slaughter. The prophecy said that neither could live while the other survives. Dumbledore thought that I had to die in order to make Riddle mortal again, and had planned accordingly. I was stupid, and believed it as well, so I went to Riddle, and allowed him to kill me. Only, instead of me dying, Voldemort killed his own soul fragment. I pretended to be dead, and during the ensuing battle back at Hogwarts, my friend, Neville Longbottom, used the sword of Gryffindor, that he'd gotten during the battle from one of Voldemort's followers, to kill Nagini. Voldemort was now mortal, and in the final duel between he and I, I killed him.

"It was only afterwards, almost a year later, that I found out the true horrors of what Voldemort and his Death eaters had done. Thousands of magicals; killed for not following Voldemort to the letter. Hundreds of nonmagical-born witches and wizards; killed because they were 'impure.' A couple hundred children turned to werewolves by Fenrir Greyback, and his pack of werewolves who enjoy preying on, and turning small children. Damn near a hundred thousand nonmagicals killed in terrorist attacks by Death Eaters, almost three dozen small towns killed to the last child. Just because they weren't magical, or their blood wasn't 'pure', or some other such _tripe_.

I could feel the magic wafting off Harry, and I forced myself to put a calming hand on his shoulder. He shot me a wan, thankful smile, before he scowled as he continued.

"I went and looked at the records in the magical and nonmagical worlds." He growled. "After Dumbledore defeated Grindlewald during WWII, he asked that the Grindlewald's followers be allowed to 'repent' for their transgressions. None of Grindlewald's followers were from Britain, so Dumbledore didn't care. Each government ended up having to later deal with insurrections and terrorist actions that could've been avoided if they'd simply been executed after WWII. They were all imprisoned, but that didn't hold them, obviously. But, again, Dumbledore didn't care, and it was only the fact that he didn't object, like he _should have_ , when Death Eaters claimed the Imperius defense, that allowed so many to not even go to Azkaban. Voldemort had a ready, and free force as soon as he got a new body, and he freed the few of his followers in Azkaban.

"I had Hermione run some numbers for me, and if all of the Death Eaters had been executed back in '81, or even '82, then almost three quarters of those that died upon Voldemort's return would still be alive." Harry sighed. " _That_ , is why I am willing to go against my morals when dealing with Mathias. He's been on this island since about mid-June, 1982. He killed any and all survivors that washed up on this island for the first decade, before he found some Russians willing to work for him, that he _made_ to be devoted to him. Himiko's been whispering in his ears the entire time he's been here urging him to find her a new body to transfer into. She had a fire ritual that she used as a cover to help her choose her 'successor' back in the day, where one of her priestesses, usually the most beautiful one, was burned at the stake, and she used her weather control to blow the fire out if she found the priestess sufficiently beautiful. Mathias recreated the ritual, and not a single woman or girl has survived. He's burned _hundreds_ of women, and personally killed _thousands_ of men on this island. And it gets worse."

"How much worse?" Roth asked, and I couldn't help but notice the hardness in his voice and eyes as he spoke.

"Mathias created a process for becoming one of his… _Solarii_ … that involves locking them in a cave, and forcing them to kill and eat each other to become a part of the cult, so that they can survive on this island. _If_ , they survive. The Solarii have killed thousands more in his name, captured dozens, hundreds of women, raped them, taken them to be burned… And they _enjoy_ it. They gladly torture the survivors that turn up here, remorselessly kill whoever refuses to join them… All of these men have tasted human flesh, all of them have killed for pure enjoyment, all of these men have raped at least one woman, most often in gang rapes, even small children… If Sam had told him that she was related to Himiko, then he would've immediately kidnapped her, and taken her for the burning ritual. When Sam survived, since I can almost guarantee Himiko would've saved her from burning due to their relation, in addition to the fact that Sam definitely qualifies for 'beautiful' in modern times, Mathias would've taken her to have Himiko's soul transferred into her, killing Sam, and leaving her body possessed by Himiko.

"Mathias thinks Himiko a mere queen, not knowing that she is an extraordinarily powerful witch. He thinks that the storms are only tenuously controlled by her, caused by her death, and refusal to move on. He thinks that, once she's in a mortal body again, the storms will stop, and he can leave."

"He, _will_ , be able to leave, once she's in a new body, right?" Alex asked. I'd kind of forgotten he was with us, he'd been so silent. That was until I saw his computer open, recording everything Harry had said with the FaceTime camera.

"Probably." Harry said. "However, Himiko's more than likely totally insane by now. On top of that, the world's mostly forgotten about her, and almost nobody knows her name anymore. She'd try to cause global devastation. She'd reveal magic to the world, and this place would get nuked faster than you can say _obliviate_. Then all of the magical communities would get revealed as a result, and the masses are not exactly intelligent when in a cohesive whole. A person is smart, _people_ are stupid. And the nonmagical _people_ would call for the deaths of every magical in the world in retaliation for Himiko's unprovoked attack on them. It would be WWIII, and the magical world would _lose_. Horrendously. Completely. And utterly.

"How badly outnumbered are magicals?" I asked.

"At last count? About five thousand to one." Harry said succinctly. "It would be a massacre to make the Holocaust look fairly tame. _That_ is why I am willing to go against my morals while dealing with Mathias and his cult. Voldemort and his followers caused mass death because they weren't executed when they should have been, just like Grindlewald's followers after WWII. If I don't kill every man on this island, then after I take care of Himiko, they're all going to scatter to the four corners of the world, and continue what they've _been_ doing on this island. And there will be private organizations who know of the magical world, who will take them in, and get them to talk about Himiko, and everything about this island. Those organizations will come here, and try to recreate Himiko. If they succeed, then taking care of Himiko will have meant _nothing_.

"I hate killing with a passion." Harry gritted out through clenched teeth. "But I will _never_ allow innocent people to be killed because I refused to kill someone who does not need or want redemption. It will never happen. That is why I used the Imperius on Mathias, and why I plan on killing every bastard in that place tomorrow morning. I will _not_ let them get away with what they've done.

The deck was silent for a moment, save for Alex typing on his computer, now that our lecture was seemingly over, while the rest of us were deep in thought.

"Well," Roth said after a while. "I guess we'll sleep in shifts then, for tonight. We'll head up there in the morning. And if they're all even half as bad as you say, Mr. Potter…"

Roth trailed off before unholstering his two pistols.

"Then I'll feel no regret putting those bastards out of their misery." He finished, before putting them back in their holsters.

We all drifted apart, after that. Well, the others did, but Sam and I stuck close to Harry, offering silent support as he obviously relived some very horrible memories, memories brought close to the surface by his talk with us.

.

It was nearly midnight when I awoke, groggy, not quite understanding where I was, or why I was awake, until I looked over my shoulder, and saw Sam spooning into my back, while I was hugging Harry's front.

Or rather, trying to hug Harry's front. He was shifting in my grip, and it took me a moment to realize that he was having a nightmare. I didn't want to deal with it, as selfish as that was, so I just buried my head back against his chest, and freed my hands to rub Harry's back.

Surprisingly, it calmed him, and soon enough, I was asleep again, enjoying the heat that Harry put off.

Now what was I dreaming of again?


	12. Ch 12 Slithering Away

**Hey, everyone, sorry for the delay. I have been all over the place lately, trying to get my job back, find a new job, take some online writing commissions, start up a blade sharpening business, learn how to make a website, advertise my business, get my shed wired up with power, buy a few more things for my business, help cover costs of getting our back fence repaired because it's literally been held together with string the past few months because the high school's water system has been rusting it out for years now… Oh, and I need to replace the clutch in my car with no steady income.**

 **But enough about me, how've you all be lately? Excited for this chapter? I hope you are. I hope this chapter answers some more questions you all might have about why Harry did that long monologue on the history of Voldemort. Guilt is a powerful thing, and, properly channeled, can be a powerful motivator. It can change you, but be wary that it doesn't twist you into what you hate.**

 **That being said, enjoy the chapter!**

* * *

If there was one thing Harry hated, it was dealing with the memories of all the people that had died during the Second War. So many people that he had personally known, had taught even, dead. They had all fought with kiddy gloves, fought to incapacitate, not kill. The enemy fought to kill.

And Harry _knew_ that it was all his fault that so many people hadn't lived. Even a decade and a half after the last spell was cast, despite everything Ron, and Hermione, and everyone else insisted on, it was Harry's fault that magical Britain was still hovering on the brink of extinction.

Hogwarts still struggled to fill the classes every year. There simply weren't enough purebloods to do so, and any halfbloods that could, got out of the country before Voldemort had gained too much power. Muggle-borns had been slaughtered wholesale in the Death Eater version of Auschwitz, and the Order of the Phoenix was gutted during the final battle. Really, only Kingsley Shacklebolt remained as a former member, but he was now Minister of Magic, and so, couldn't run around like he had. Harry had later found out that Arthur and Molly were merely "support staff", Molly for her cooking, and Arthur for the intelligence he provided from within the Ministry, due to the fact that he had no oath to prevent leaking information to third parties like those in the Auror Department did.

As a result, due to the fact that a good portion of the Order was made up of Aurors who took oaths of _intentional_ non-lethality, they couldn't knowingly cast anything much stronger than a stunner at the Death Eaters. That didn't stop them from killing Death Eaters by accident, but Umbridge had gotten her pudgy little fingers into too many things, and prevented anyone from knowingly killing her compatriots.

Shaking his head, Harry tried to sit up, only to tug uncomfortably at his middle when Lara's arms refused to let go of him.

Sticking his pinky in his mouth, he made sure to get it nice and wet, before then sticking it in Lara's ear, and twisting it around.

"EEEEYYAAAAA!" Lara screamed, coming awake with a jolt. "WHAT THE HELL?!"

"Lara, I was sleeping!" Sam complained, and Harry peered over Lara to see the Japanese-Portuguese girl spooning Lara from behind, her arms wrapped around the English woman's waist, just like Lara's were around his own.

' _Talk about being close friends…'_ Harry mused silently.

"Time to get up." Harry said, looking pointedly at Lara, and then at his waist. Instead of scrambling away from him, like he expected, she instead clung harder to him, burying her head into his back.

Blinking at her, and then at Sam, who innocently looked up at him while also clinging closer to Lara, he shook his head before applying an impervious charm to himself and his clothes, and summoned a bathtub's worth of water above them.

He made sure to make the water freezing cold when he did so, and winced when the high pitched shrieks of surprise and indigence, along with no small amount of thermal shock, ripped out of two throats with a vengeance. But, his goal was accomplished, and Lara and Sam both practically apparated away from him, shaking water off themselves, waking the rest of the _Endurance_ officers on the deck as the two girls splashed the cold water onto them. Harry idly enjoyed the show they put on as he stood and stretched.

After about five minutes of freaking out, and arguing between the two girls, and the rest of the officers, Lara and Sam turned and leveled their best glares Harry, who stood silently off to one side, completely dry, a small, smug smile on his face.

"Are you two quite done?" He asked

In response, said two let off several strings of curses and jinxes and hexes at Harry, who deflected and shielded against them with ease, before tagging them both with a stinging hex to both nipples; said piece of anatomy being completely erect in reaction to the sudden dousing of cold water. The girls shrieked in protest, before turning their backs on Harry, only to simultaneously call a retreat when stinging hex impacted their rears, sending them tumbling over each other in a bid to find some cover.

"Are you awake now?" Harry called out, idly waving warming and drying charms at Alex, Reyes, and Roth, while Jonah simply patted himself dry.

"Yes!" Lara yelled.

"Then make yourselves presentable, and then we're going to start moving to the monastery." Harry responded. "Mathias, wake up. Contact your men and tell them that you're taking the scenic route, luring the Key in to the monastery. Understood?"

"Of course," Mathias sneered, waking up the instant Harry told him to. Then he took out his radio and made the call to his men. They were understandably nervous at first, but then relaxed once Mathias assured them that he was fine, and that the Key was more gullible than wary. "It's better to have a willing sacrifice, then the unwilling sacrifices we've been making due with."

Once Lara and Sam came back, Harry assembled everyone, after first releasing Mathias and reverting the deck back to normal from Sam's transfiguration.

"Mathias, you will be riding on my nose, where I can keep an eye on you." Harry said, eliciting confusion from everyone. "Everyone else, you'll be riding behind my head."

And with that, Harry began to _change_.

"Animagus." Jonah breathed, backing away as Harry began growing, his clothes morphing into scales, hair disappearing, body lengthening and growing larger and larger.

In a mere few seconds, a near thirty meter long basilisk lay coiled over the deck of the _Endurance._

"My God." Jonah breathed. "A _basilisk_. A fucking _basilisk_. How the hell is that even possible?!"

The giant black serpent seemed to smirk at Jonah, who faintly realized that he wasn't dying while looking into the Killing-Curse-green eyes of the basilisk. Then Harry lowered his head to the ground, and Mathias tentatively climbed onto the snout of the basilisk. The officers of the _Endurance_ all looked warily at each other, before reluctantly climbing onto Harry's back, right behind his head. Lara and Sam were first, followed by Alex, who was very aware of how many guns Roth had directly behind him if he did anything inappropriate to Sam. Clinging smugly to Roth's back was Reyes, who had Jonah behind her, providing a solid method of keeping her in place via his sheer weight, not to mention the sticking charms he'd thrown over everyone.

Once everyone was settled, Harry gave an enormous screech, before coiling up, and shooting forward like an arrow from a bow, eliciting screams of terror from everyone.

They crashed onto the beach in a mixed plume of sand and water, before they were out of the water, and surging up the beach, bypassing WWII era Nazi and Japanese equipment. In the distance, they could see the remnants of old Spanish galleons, British Empire era ships of war, and dozens of other ships from all ages, all of them completely wrecked, holes in their hulls, cracked in half, none of them seaworthy in any way.

"Oh shit!" Lara cried, before Harry barreled into the jungle at the top of the beach, still moving at full speed. He ducked and weaved backwards and forwards, up and down over the island terrain as multitudes of animals fled in terror from the massive snake that moved like greased lightning.

In mere minutes, they began scaling the mountain, following the path delineated in the sky by the gondola transport system that some past inhabitant had set up. There were several times where Harry's passengers screamed as he leapt chasms and cliffs, breaking off huge chunks of stone as he landed on the far side, though he never seemed to slow down.

"You're not going to make this next chasm!" Matthias bellowed, and the _Endurance_ personnel looked around each other, only to pale as they saw a vast valley in front of them. A vast valley that they were barreling towards at top speed.

"Harry, if we die, I'm going to _kill_ you!" Lara screamed at the top of her lungs.

Seconds later, a thirty meter long basilisk lunged off a cliff almost a thousand feet in the air, the seven passengers it was carrying screaming in complete terror. They fell for a few seconds, before the basilisk's outline seemed to blur.

Ten seconds after the basilisk had lunged off the cliff, a thirty five meter long, black, Ukrainian Ironbelly roared its challenge for all the world to hear. Its poison green eyes glared harshly down at the terrified Solarii cultists who stood guard over the bridge to a palace of ancient Japanese design. The cultists were too terrified to even think of firing on the dragon, so it was a relatively quick death for them when a gout of magic-enhanced, ten-thousand-degree-dragon-fire scorched them from the face of the earth forever.

Then it landed on the terraced steps in front of the palace, where it laid down to allow its passengers off its back.

"By the _gods_." Jonah breathed, looking over the giant dragon.

"… I so wish I could post this on the Internet." Sam moaned as she clicked several stills of her master in his dragon form.

Just as she finished, however, the dragon shrank, turning back into Harry, who glared up at the palace.

"Matthias, lead us, don't give them any warning." Harry said, motioning for the madman to lead them up the steps.

"Of course." Matthias said, doing his best to keep an eye on Harry while simultaneously leading the wizard.

"Sam, Lara, silence our companions' guns and their feet." Harry ordered.

"Yes, Master." The girls chorused, grimacing as they felt their magic push against them. The two girls flicked their wands out of their holsters, and began tapping the weapons their friends carried, save Jonah, who merely waved a hand over his shotgun and pistol.

Lara frowned and shot silencing charms at Jonah's feet earning a sheepish smile from the Maori, while Roth nodded in appreciation to Sam.

"So, uh, should I have brought more ammo?" Alex asked, before slinging his backpack off his back to open it, revealing several hundred rounds of ammo for each weapon they had.

Reyes and Roth's eyes lit up, before confusion overcame the latter's face.

"How come we didn't hear it, and how come you haven't been groaning about the weight?" Roth asked. "That many rounds weighs a lot, I don't care who ya are."

"I had Harry put a silencing charm, and a featherweight charm on my pack a month or so ago, I got tired of having to haul a few dozen pounds of wires all over the ship whenever something broke on that lemon of yours." Alex said easily.

"I'd like to see you call my ship a lemon in front of Grim." Reyes chuckled.

"I did." Alex shot back smugly. "He agreed."

Roth sputtered indignantly, while Jonah joined Alex in laughing at the captain.

"Enough, you lot." Lara said, a flash of irritability overcoming her for a moment.

Unnoticed by anyone, a single twitch of Harry's eyebrow betrayed his amused shock, realizing that Lara's words had spilled out of her mouth the same instant the words had crossed his mind. That, and the brush of annoyance that he realized wasn't his own against his mind tipped him off that there was more going on than he initially thought.

"Matthias, tell us when we're about to approach a guard post." Harry said, before stepping up next to the Imperioused madman. "Let's go."

With that, the group of eight moved towards the doors of the palace.

"God have mercy on these bastards." Roth murmured quietly to Reyes from their position in the back. "Because Mr. Potter certainly won't."

* * *

 **Alright then! How was that? Now before anybody gets into a hissy fit over Harry having a couple Animagus forms: Harry is a freak of magical nature. You're not supposed to survive having a fragment of someone else's soul stuck in your head for, at this point, half his life. I've always thought that, if Harry was an Animagus, his form would be either a dragon, or a phoenix. Why? He guards his friends with much of the same ferocity as a dragon does their gold, or, with the HP universe's dragons, a mother dragon guarding her eggs. A phoenix, because he's died, and risen from his death like a phoenix. As trite and cliché as that sounds.**

 **I think it's obvious that the Basilisk form is a result of Voldemort's soul leaving it's indelible mark on Harry's magic. That is my handwavy-bullshit-explanation for that. Don't like it, go read something else.**

 **Review please!**


	13. Ch 13 Storming the Palace

**Hi people! So sorry for the… *** **checks calendar** *** five day delay! I recently got a new, part time job, and it has been kicking my ass, due to the fact that my hours are not consistent. Unfortunately, I did not get my old job back, which is both a blessing and a curse, because pretty much all my new income will be used to pay for insurance, so I don't end up having to pay a fee for not having insurance during tax season next year. Because Obamacare is stupid and fining you for not having insurance because you can't afford it makes** _ **total**_ **sense, right?**

 **Whatever.**

 **So, in this chapter, we have some fun. There's a fight scene, but I'm not really all that good at those, so it may be a little lackluster. Anywho, I apologize for the lateness on this update. And when you're done, please review!**

As we stepped through the massive front doors of the Japanese-style palace, I slipped my holly wand into my right hand, and the Elder Wand into my left, before sending a piercing curse each into two of the four guards standing inside. I'd followed immediately after Matthias, allowing the guards to relax when they saw him before I stepped through.

Sam and Lara stepped in immediately after me, and they each threw a piercing curse from their bare hands, and as the four curses met their victims, I wove a quick silencing ward around the entrance area as the men fell to the ground, their weapons clattering out of their hands.

"Good job." I muttered, feeling through my magic as the rest of our companions filtered in around us.

"Check the bodies." Roth said, before moving past us to do exactly that.

I simply watched he and Reyes quickly and efficiently pawed through the thugs' clothing, pulling out wrinkled and dirtied money of various currencies, lock picking tools, some fire making tools, and miscellaneous other things that they kept in their multitudes of pockets. The couple put their finds in a small Expanded bag I'd given each of them, and when they were done, I transfigured the four bodies into small stones that I pocketed once again.

"Let's keep moving." Lara said, moving ahead of me in what the muggle military called a combat glide. Given the way that she now had her wand in her hand, and was using the opposite arm to stabilize it while moving on bent legs and a slightly hunched back, I was impressed that she was able to move so smoothly. I cocked an eyebrow when I saw Sam mimic it with slight difficulty, and felt both eyebrows climb into my hairline when the rest of the group followed Lara's example. Roth and Reyes both settled into it like a pair of comfortable old boots, and Jonah's combat glide seemed specially tailored to a man of his size, while Alex tried awkwardly to mimic it.

I merely shrugged and walked normally. I had a way that I fought, and trying to change it up in the middle of an important mission was a good way to get everyone else killed.

We encountered two dozen more guards, and two dozen more stones entered my Expanded pocket after looting their bodies. Instead of going higher up into the palace as I had expected, we continually went lower in the palace, until we came upon the point where the palace itself was anchored into the bedrock of the cliff face it perched upon. Matthias led us easily through twisting halls and passageways that were equally rock and manmade materials. Though, the number of human skulls crowded in and around the multitude of candles creeped me out a bit.

"And right through here, is the sacrificial chamber!" Matthias exclaimed gleefully.

We all snapped our eyes to him, and I saw that there was a line of runes encircling the cave, and I realized with a start that Matthias had crossed it a moment ago, in keeping with my directive of him remaining in front of us. However, the line of runes seemed to have severed my _Imperious_ over Matthias, freeing him, and allowing him to alert his cult to our presence.

"KILL THE MEN!" Matthias bellowed, turning and running deeper into the cave.

Looking around, I realized that there were hundreds of men in the cave, there was a stake atop a pile of wood, backed by a waterfall fed by a river that I assumed came off the mountain behind the palace. And surrounding all that? All the men from all over the island. Nearly five hundred of them.

"Lara, Sam, shields!" I bellowed, throwing forward a _Protego Maxima_.

" _Protego Duo!_ " The two girls bellowed, and between our three shields, not a single bullet fired at us from the cultists hit us.

" _Singularis non mutua penetratio_." I muttered under my breath, carefully weaving my magic into Lara and Sam's shields. "Shoot back! You can shoot through the shields!"

And with that, I threw a high powered cutting charm, almost six feet in width, through the shields and into the mass of insane cultists. Multiple men lost their heads that way, and I watched in satisfaction as my apprentices threw out devastatingly overpowered bludgeoning spells that tore through dozens of men, leaving gaping holes in their torsos, while Jonah summoned a wave of water from the waterfall to smash dozens more into walls and each other. Roth, Reyes, and Alex all fired liberally into the mass of men who were suddenly panicking as they realized that their so-called prey was fighting back, and killing them in droves. I noticed that some at the back were trying to escape out of other tunnels, but I cast my magic out far and wide, and caught a few dozen in the tunnels, along with Matthias' semi-familiar presence, and Summoned them back into the chamber, before conjuring steel walls that blocked off all the passages in the chamber, save our own.

"WE'RE TRAPPED!" One of the men bellowed, and I watched with grim amusement as the men began veritably throwing themselves at us.

"Alex!" Roth yelled. "I need ammo!"

"Got it!" Alex yelled back, and I watched out of the corner of my eyes as he emptied his own pistol with abandon, and knelt down, swinging his pack off his back. He dug through it quickly, and then I saw a magazine get thrown to Roth. Lara, Sam, Jonah, and I continued casting quickly and lethally, but even then, we couldn't stop a small wave of men from throwing themselves bodily at the shield the girls and I had erected.

"THE ONI! THEY'RE HERE!"

I whirled at the roar that sounded behind me in response, and threw out a wide-area banishing spell that smashed back a wave of men dressed in samurai armor, and smelling of decaying flesh.

" _Protego Duo!"_ I bellowed, and relaxed a slight bit when the samurai were unable to penetrate it. "Jonah, Alex! We're going to kill the undead, Lara, Sam, Roth, and Reyes, continue killing the cultists!"

"Got it!"

" _Understood, Master."_

I flinched when I realized the girls had responded to my command mentally, but not verbally, realizing they'd piped their thoughts directly into my mind, bypassing my Occlumency barriers completely. I pushed that concern to the back of my mind, instead turning my attention back to killing the so-called Oni.

"Shoot the head!" Alex called. "It's got the least amount of armor, and it's guaranteed to kill it when you do penetrate it!"

Despite the fact that I wasn't using a gun, I began focusing my cutting curses and piercing curses on the Oni's heads, and watched with satisfaction as they fell much faster. Alex's bullets sparked brightly off the faceplates of the undead samurai until they shattered, and then black blood exploded out of their faces when the next few rounds penetrated their skulls.

' _Half congealed blood.'_ I mused with grim amusement.

" _Gross."_ Came Sam's voice.

" _That… is disgusting."_ Lara complained.

" _Would you girls do me a favor and stay out of my head until we finish killing everything that's trying to kill us?"_ I demanded with annoyance ringing in my mental tone. The stunned silence was gratifying, but the way their spellfire slacked was concerning, at least until Roth bellowed at them to quit lollygagging, and keep shooting.

BOOM!

I came out of my minor trance at the sound of something enormous hitting my shield keeping the Oni away, and looked up with no small amount of horror as an undead _thing_ at least as big as Hagrid, swung a spiked and edged metal club at my shield again, a resounding BOOM echoing through the chamber, even as Matthias' maniacal laughter sounded out.

"You'll never beat that thing!" he yelled. "Nothing can stop it!"

"Don't be so sure!" I bellowed back, a minor _Sonorus_ charm amplifying my voice to be heard over the gunfire and explosions rather easily. " _Avada Kedavra!_ "

A blast of green light, a rushing sound, and the Oni finished smashing its club into my second shield before it crumpled in one enormous heap, its brethren climbing over its body in order to continue their siege on us. Jonah's horrified gaze told me he didn't like what I did, but I ignored that in favor or staying alive.

.

"That… was exhausting…" I panted, sitting on the ground, my wand gripped loosely in my casting hand.

"Tell me about it." Sam said, leaning against me, also panting.

Roth and Reyes waded through the cultists, putting a bullet in the head of each one, just to be sure they were dead. Alex was with them, helping and passing out ammo in equal measure, and Jonah and Harry were wading through the undead "Oni", using severing curses on the necks of each one in order to ensure those were truly dead. The men, and the Oni had seemed to come in an unending swarm, and I honestly lost track of time. I didn't know what time it was, and honestly, seeing and smelling all the blood, and dead and undead bodies was beginning to make me rather nauseous.

"So…" Sam drew out the pause next to me, and I wondered what she was going to say next. "Since when did you have a telepathic link with Harry?"

"… I was actually going to ask you the same question." I countered.

"So, that was the first time you've ever heard him in your head?"

"Yeah. You?"

"Same."

We were silent a moment.

' _What can this mean?'_ I thought.

" _It means that I have to move up Occlumency training for you and Sam."_

I flinched when I heard Harry's voice in my head, and automatically turned to face him, Sam doing so at the exact same time.

" _Can she hear me?"_ I asked.

" _Of course, I can hear you, sweetie."_

"… _Have you two had sex with each other, at some point in time?"_

I couldn't help the blush that I felt spreading from the top of my face, all the way down my body. Sam escaped most of the embarrassment, but there was a light dusting of red on her cheeks. Her darker skin made it more difficult to tell when she was blushing, and I couldn't help but remember when we were eighteen, and Sam had brought some American whiskey into our flat…

" _That is not something I want to_ see _girls, however, if you said anything while you_ were _with each other, you might've accidentally created a bond. Sex based magic is powerful, and can be very unpredictable. So, I'm not surprised that it's interacting with our Master/Apprentice Bond, and giving you two your own telepathic link. Although, right now, we're literally just broadcasting into each others' heads, and not actually directing it from sender to intended receiver only. We might as well be speaking aloud for all the good this thing does us currently."_

"… _Well… That's certainly very… um, interesting."_

" _Lara, how is it that_ you _, of all people, are capable of making mental communication, awkward as fuck?"_

"Sam!" I yelped aloud, before scrambling to my feet and making for Harry at what I hoped to be a quick, yet semi-dignified clip. Sam's laughter told me I failed miserably, and Harry was suppressing a chuckle when I finally got to him.

"Decided to actually help, Little Bird?" Jonah asked, peering at me with a sly smile on his face.

"Hush, you." I retorted, turning away from the two men to throw a series of cutting curses at a near perfect line of undead samurai corpses.

"What's up with her?" I heard Jonah mutter behind me.

"Master/Apprentice Bond showed something new." Harry responded. "Apparently brought up something rather embarrassing."

"Prat!" I called, throwing a Jelly-Legs Jinx over my shoulder without looking to make sure it was thrown at Harry. As such, I was rather surprised when I heard Jonah yelp, and then a rather solid thud as a body far larger than Harry's hit the ground.

"Lara!" Jonah yelled.

"Sorry!" I yelled back, ignoring Sam's guffaws in the background. "That was meant for Harry!"

"What am I going to do with you, Little Bird?"

"Throw her over your shoulder and make for a cave?"

"SAM!"

I have no problem admitting I shrieked Sam's name, as it was the only way to convey my distaste for the image she put in my head. If it was Harry on the other hand…

" _Enough sexual innuendo, please, you two."_

" _Sorry, Harry."_ I said, blushing while trying to hide myself from everyone's gazes.

" _Yeah, sorry, Lara's living wet dream."_ Sam cracked mentally. Then she scrambled away, heading towards Roth and Reyes, cackling out loud.

"I don't want to know." I heard Roth mutter.

"Me either." Reyes agreed.

"I'm surrounded by bumbling, babbling baboons." Harry sighed behind me.

"Nice alliteration." Jonah threw out.

"Thanks."

.

I couldn't help but laugh internally at Sam and Lara's antics, though some of Sam's comments left me wondering about their relationship with each other, and with me. I continued wading through the bodies of the formerly undead, slicing their heads off as I followed Lara. She seemed intent on putting distance between herself and the rest of us, something I was wary of doing in this place. Supposedly, all our enemies were now dead, the cultists, and the Oni, however, I wasn't counting on it. On top of that, I could still feel Himiko's magic laying oppressively over myself, Lara, Sam, and Jonah, though I was doing my best to shield them from the brunt of it. Himiko's magic didn't seem to be doing anything to Roth, Reyes, or Alex, though it did continually swirl around them like thick mist blowing against a building in a light breeze. It was probably nothing, but I was keeping a weather eye on the magic that drenched this island.

That was another thing about this island. It was almost like being at Hogwarts again, due to how much magic there was built up around this place. However, Hogwarts laid on an interstice of seven major ley lines, absorbed power from the students' ambient magic, pulled fifteen percent of the professors' magic from them, and no less than fifty percent of the Headmaster or -mistress's magic, in order to power the wards, the pictures, the statues, the house elves, and a thousand other things, like the Grand Staircase. The professors and Headmaster were supposed to sign contracts allowing Hogwarts to pull on their magical power, however, Dumbledore had fallen out of that habit for whatever reason, which is why the wards had failed so spectacularly under Death Eater assault.

The wards here on Yamatai, however, felt about a hundred times stronger. However many ley lines this island must sit on, they must all be powerful. Plus… all the sacrifices over the millennia. The blood that drenched the ground, all the people killed in the name of Himiko, it was intensely powerful ritualistic magic that continued to empower the wards here. Add also, the fact that, if my research was correct, Himiko sucked the magic out of forty nine witches to add to her own power, and each witch was seven times more powerful than the average witch. All those sevens and multiples of sevens had a compounding effect, and as a result, Himiko's soul now held immense magical power.

Still not quite as powerful as myself, but she was probably still exceptionally dangerous, even if she couldn't cast spells directly at us. Her ability to throw around storms like candy more than made up for that handicap though. However, the fact that I hadn't felt any noticeable shifts in the wards, or Himiko's magic since we killed her followers and her undead servants, I was fully anticipating some sort of major attack on us via a storm to end all storms soon enough.

"That's the last of 'em over here, Mr. Potter!"

I turned to look back at Roth, who was beginning to paw through the pockets of the men whose heads he'd put a bullet in, while Reyes was already doing so.

"Hey, I found a bunch of bullets in this zombie's inro." Sam called. "Along with some other random bits and bobs."

"Put them in Alex's pack for now." I called. "We'll look through it all later. After you search the zombies, incinerate them."

" _Incendio_ , right?" Sam asked.

"Correct." I nodded.

With that, I went back to cutting heads off, but now I began summoning inro off the bodies, and slipping them into my pockets. Despite their age, all of the inro were in excellent condition, and each had their own personality. The swords on the other hand, could've all been fresh out of the forge. They were all shiny along the cutting edge, literally with a mirror finish, and their sheathes were perfectly preserved, well oiled, and smoothed and polished to a fare-thee-well. All in all, every one of these swords could have been sold to a museum for an easy million pounds each, both due to their age, and their excellent, perfectly preserved state.

I may not be a greedy individual, but there is a certain sense of accomplishment in being able to say I added significantly to my family fortune. Even if Mum's portrait usually scolded me for being so mercenary. Of course, being physically older than my own parents' portrait representations of them could be awkward at times, but Mum's wondering of when I would bring home a girlfriend, and Dad's crass jokes about me preferring fast women really did not endear me to bringing home any girl.

I would probably end up being the last Potter for a very long time.

Or, at least, that had been my plan until meeting Sam and Lara.

Both were exceedingly attractive, both were intelligent, and both of them could hold intelligent conversations for hours on end about a variety of topics, and the fact that neither of them were trying to get in my pants in an effort to get ahold of my money only made me more comfortable around them.

' _Tangent.'_ I thought to myself.

I'd been going off on tangents such as these for a couple of months now, really, ever since I met Lara and Sam. Magic was trying to tell me something, and I wasn't sure if I liked what it was trying to say. It took a couple of hours but we eventually got through all the bodies we'd made, and Lara and Sam were taking a rather fiendish delight in setting the Oni on fire, Sam using the regular _Incendio_ spell, and Lara lobbing balls of her unique green flames that practically flash vaporized her targets. I needed to get her to throw one of those things through an arithmancy sensor once we got back to Britain, find out what the hell was going on with it. Beautiful she may be, but a Veela she is not.

"Alright, Harry, now what do we do?" Sam asked, and I blinked, realizing that she and Lara were done incinerating the Oni, and were now standing patiently in front of me.

"Now, since I got the layout of the entire island from Matthias, we are going to work our way through this place, clearing out any stragglers that didn't come up here when Matthias called." I decided, careful to block off the part of my mind Lara and Sam had access to. Didn't need them knowing I didn't really have much of a plan in reality. "We'll take out any other Oni as well. We'll stay in a group, like we are now, and if any of us comes across anything remotely valuable, interesting, or just plain weird, we'll deal with it as a group. Understood?"

"Yes, Master." The girls chorused, while Roth and Reyes waved that they had heard and understood. Jonah merely nodded from where he'd walked up behind the girls.

"So, what's the first place that we're going to clear out?" Lara asked.

"You remember that cliff I jumped us off of?" I smirked.

Everyone shuddered.

"Still terrifying to even _think_ about." Sam said.

"Well, at the bottom of that canyon is a makeshift town, patched together from a multitude of materials found on the island." I explained. "We'll start there."

"Sounds good." Roth called. "We're all done here."

I nodded, and with a sweep of my hand, all the Solarii corpses were pebbles that flew into my pocket.

"Then let's go."


	14. Ch 14 The Shanty Town

**Hey folks, sorry for the super late update! I realize this is almost two full weeks late, but life's been a wreck for me lately. I quit my last job because shitty management was shitty, and I'm trying to become a professional author, so I've been taking NSFW story writing commissions over on the other side of the internet, under a different penname.**

 **No, I'm not going to tell you what it is. I need to keep the two sides separate.**

 **On the other hand, I just updated my profile with some information, so please check it out.**

 **Now, I only did a light review and editing of this chapter, so the quality might've dipped a bit, and I apologize for that.**

"Wow."

"Yeah. Wow."

Being an aspiring filmmaker, I have an eye for what is and is not photogenic. It's very definite, and usually, easy to determine either or.

This is a case where I'm not sure if I want to start filming and taking pictures or not though. On the one hand, there are several pagodas in various states of disarray, disrepair, and disuse, but on the other hand, there's a small town, with lopsided, patched together towers and buildings surrounding, butting up against, and reinforcing the pagodas that have been here for thousands of years. There are dozens of cables and ropes going from one small tower, to the ground, or another building, or one of the pagodas' various levels There are crude crosses draped with white cloth, probably in homage to Himiko in what seems to be her favorite position of standing with her arms stretched out to her sides.

There's a small shrine, from what I can see, and there's a gate not far from it, and beyond it, something that looks an awful lot like a windmill mixed with a water wheel, which I can see is drawing a cable through a pulley system, from which several crab fishing cages are suspended, full of various supplies. All in all, it's fairly impressive, the way everything has been cobbled together, and made to work through sheer grit and gumption. But at the same time, even from my position almost a hundred feet above the tallest pagoda on Harry's back, I can still see the multitude of blood splatters on almost every building. There's mud everywhere, and I can even see a brown, sludgy river whose contents I'm not sure I want to know about.

" _I can smell it from here."_ Harry told me. _"It's human waste. And that pool on the other side of that gate? Where it all goes."_

"Ugh, cause I didn't want to throw up or anything." I groaned.

"Tell me about it." Lara moaned in front of me. "I can smell it from here."

"Glad I've only got a human nose." Roth said behind me, and I could hear the smirk in his voice.

"Lucky you." Lara and I deadpanned in unison.

Harry banked around, and I could see a decrepit rescue helicopter that was, surprisingly, in one piece up on top of a small, squat building. It had a small patch of land in front of it, before it turned into a cliff and dropped off to the ground level of the Shanty Town.

" _I'm going to land there."_ Harry said. _"It's the most wide open area where I can do so without having to shift in midair, and leave you all falling like, thirty feet."_

He quickly put action to word, and soon, we were sliding off his neck onto the muddy ground, before he morphed back into his human form.

"I don't like those barrels of fuel." Roth frowned.

I looked up at him, idly considering how the light reflected off his hair, calculating the correct angle to pull off a heroic shot on a camera, even as I asked him why.

"Because, each barrel is positioned at a choke point, or a place where the buildings wouldn't be effected by one of them being blown up in order to take out intruders." Roth explained. "That fuel is probably important to them though. Both for defensive purposes, and to power any generators they may have. I saw lights on top of the mountain last night, and I know they don't have anything natural around here that could power lights that I could see from the _Endurance_ from on top of the mountain."

"Good point Roth." Harry nodded, and I couldn't help the heat in my cheeks that came unbidden upon seeing the wind brushing his hair so nicely, or the way the sunlight made his eyes glow. "Sam, Lara, let's have a competition, and a learning experience all in one."

"Oh boy." Lara groaned.

I couldn't stop my snicker; Lara hated lessons that involved no bookwork.

"Sit down, close your eyes, and reach for your magic." Harry instructed, eliciting a matched "Yes Master" from the two of us.

Reaching for our magic was something Harry had been teaching us since the beginning. He said it made learning how to cast spells infinitely easier, because you could then learn to reach out and feel another's magic as they cast a spell, and then attempt to mimic it by consciously shaping your own magic to match. It made it easier for me to learn, but Lara almost _needed_ the textbook to describe things to her before she could actually understand it enough to replicate a spell. Either that, or a formal lecture. As such, I got the feeling I was going to win this little impromptu lesson with Harry.

"What I want you two to do, is reach out with your magic, and feel the makeup of the barrels, and the fuel they contain." Harry said. "I already know how many barrels of fuel there are here in the Shanty Town, you need to find out how many there are."

Shit.

Maybe I won't get this one first. Lara's always had a better head for numbers. And patterns. Fuck, this is going to be tough.

Pushing those thoughts to the side, I instead threw my magic out of my body, feeling Lara's magic push against it, but both of our magic was overwhelmed by Harry's magic. Reaching out, I felt the barrel that I knew was right in front of me. It felt… odd. Heavier than I thought, I attempted to levitate it, only to feel the fuel slosh around in the drum when I didn't use enough magic to lift it. Trying again, I apply a featherweight charm, a levitation charm, and a shrinking charm to it in rapid succession, and then summon the barrel to my right hand.

I feel it slap into my hand, the barrel about the size of a soda can, and I open my eyes to inspect it for any flaws. There weren't any that I could see, and so I set it down in front of my crossed legs, before closing my eyes and returning to the task at hand. It took me another minute or so to find the next one, but once I did, I realized that Lara wasn't pausing with each barrel that she was picking up, lightening, and shrinking, in fact, she was doing multiple at a time.

" _You're getting distracted."_ Harry whispered in my mind. _"Focus."_

" _Yes, Master."_ I replied immediately, before buckling down and reaching out once more. In the end though, Lara ended up with thirty eight fuel barrels stacked in front of her, and I ended up with twenty three, meaning that Lara won the little impromptu competition.

"You did well, Sam." Harry told me aloud, putting a hand on my shoulder as he crouched behind me.

"Not really." I sighed, gesturing the differing sizes of our collections of shrunk fuel barrels. "Not only did I lose, but I lost bad."

"Did you not mentally admit that Lara is better at numbers and patterns?" Harry asked.

"… Yes." I admitted grudgingly.

"Then why are you upset that she won?"

"… I don't know." I shrugged, standing up.

"THERE! IT'S THE OUTSIDERS!"

My eyes snapped down to another of the Solarii's men just as he fired a flare high into the sky. There was a sudden cacophony of screams, yells, and battle cries, before Lara hurled a ball of iridescent emerald flames down towards a pool of what looks like crude oil, directly behind the man who had fired off the flare. The pool _is_ crude oil, and it goes up in a fireball of death that leaves three men screaming as they burn on the ground.

" _Tiaki o te Moana te Atua!"_ Jonah bellowed, jumping in front of me, a wall of water erupting from the ground and catching a multitude of bullets, arrows, and a Molotov cocktail. I step up close to Jonah, before pointing my hand around the edge, and pointing my index finger like a gun, I shoot blasting hexes at the bastards attacking us. Jonah is using his shield as a weapon as well, little droplets of water cracking away from his shield at hypersonic velocities, turning the targeted Solarii's heads into a pink mist. Roth was calmly standing behind Harry's shield spell, easily putting a bullet into each target's head, while Reyes and Alex took cover behind some sheet metal reinforced walls overlooking the drop off in front of us, and taking pot shots at the Solarii.

Lara though, was utterly insane.

My best friend is, generally speaking, soft-spoken, meek, and tries to avoid confrontation when possible. However, if someone successfully manages to piss her off, I generally avoid our flat for a couple of days, while I wait for her to calm the hell down.

The first time I'd see her well and truly upset, was when some slimeball practically raped a girl in a back booth at the Nine Bells, where Lara worked to pay her way through school. She'd confronted him, forcing him out of the bar, but not before the guy managed to forcefully cop a feel.

The newspaper the next day reported that Lara's punt managed to de-man the guy, and she managed to break one of his eye orbitals, break three ribs, cause internal bleeding, and ruptured his spleen, _and_ appendix. All she got was a stern warning from the cops to tone down her responses to those situations, but for the next week, not a single man was willing to meet Lara's eyes for longer than it took to politely ask for another drink. No man touched any of the female patrons unless said female was _at least_ a girlfriend, and even then, the girls had to initiate contact. I heard all of this second hand from my, at-the-time-boyfriend, Declan, the son of the owner of the Nine Bells. All I knew was that I spent that same week in Declan's apartment, due to the fact that I couldn't be near Lara that week, for fear of reawakening her towering fury.

I'd always compared Lara's temper to a fiery explosion, but what I was seeing now, here on Yamatai, made the comparison more apt than I ever could have imagined.

Lara was wading towards a congregation of Solarii men, the air warping and rippling around her with deadly heat. Fire covered her hands and forearms, with seemingly liquid fire dripping from her hands to the ground, where the emerald flames continued burning without obvious fuel. Green fire marked where each of her boots had been planted on the ground, and I realized that Lara's hair, while still brown, flickered and floated like flames. Some of the Solarii were firing at Lara, but I couldn't see what was happening to the bullets. Whatever was happening, it was terrifying the men.

Before long, she was only a few feet away.

I had a bad feeling about what was about to happen.

" **Burn."**

Lara's voice was positively dripping with contempt and hatred, and with no warning, an overwhelmingly large gout of fire erupted from her upraised hands and consumed the men with nothing more than a roar of hungry flames.

The few Solarii that the rest of us hadn't killed all focused their fire and Lara, who merely twitched in response. The last of the men erupted in emerald conflagrations, and their death screams were short lived.

All was silent, save for the hungry crackling of flames from Lara's body. Soon, even that petered off, and Lara toppled to the ground in an undignified heap.

"Shit." I heard Harry say, before he jumped down to where Lara lay.

The rest of us followed, though we took the stairs, until we were circled around Lara and Harry. I did my best to suppress the jealousy I felt when I saw Lara's head cradled in Harry's lap, but the disapproving frown on his face told me I wasn't as successful as I'd hoped.

"What just happened?" Reyes asked warily. "I've never seen Lara like that."

"I have." I piped up, earning incredulous looks from the others. "Just… without the flames."

"Always said she had a fiery temper, but I never thought it would be this literal." Roth mused aloud.

"We'll worry about that later." Harry snapped. "For now, Roth, Reyes, you two start exploring, focus on this half of the Shanty Town. Jonah, Alex, you two focus on the other half. If you find something interesting, put it in those magically expanded bags of yours, if it's making that talisman I made glow, then it's magical, and you should come find me first. Understood?"

The others gave various forms of agreement, even as I sat down by Lara's side.

.

When I woke up, I realized that every part of me felt hot. Like I was burning from the inside out. But, it didn't really hurt. If anything, it felt… soothing, almost relaxing. But at the same time, I felt _incredibly_ drained. Like I'd just run five consecutive marathons, nonstop.

"About time you woke up."

"Wha–"

"Here, have some water, sweetie, you must be parched."

I coughed, even as two sets of hands helped me to sit up. One set disappeared, and I cracked my eyes open enough to see them coming at me a few seconds later with a canteen full of water. It took a few tries, but eventually, I managed to open my lips enough to sip some of the water.

Other than the creaking of metal buildings, wind whistling around smaller objects, and the cries of various wildlife, all was silent.

"… Do you have any idea what you just did, Lara?"

Until, of course, Harry broke the silence with a harsh question.

"I – burnt the Solarii that were attacking us, right?" I croaked, wincing at the scratchiness of my voice.

"You burnt 'em, alright." Sam interjected, and I realized that it was _her_ who was holding the canteen for me. "Burnt 'em to nothing but ashes inside of a few seconds.

"… _Wh-what_?" I gasped, before coughing as my throat was irritated by the rushing of air.

"You assumed a semi-fire form, and burnt the Solarii in a few seconds flat." Harry added. "Walked right up to them, and told them to burn. Then you held out your hands, and a huge blast of your green fire enveloped them. Then you set the rest on fire with barely more than a look."

"I… I did that?" I asked, trying to wrap my mind around the idea of setting almost a dozen men on fire by merely looking at them.

"I don't know how you did it, or what form you took," Harry told me frankly. "But we will find out once we're done on this island."

I just nodded, unsure of anything and everything.

"Don't worry, sweetie." Sam said, putting a hand on my shoulder. "It'll be alright."

I just nodded, even as I wondered at the truth of that statement in the privacy of my mind.

.

It was obvious to me that Lara was shaken. Her memory of burning the Solarii was warped, near as I could tell. Sam was doing a good job of keeping Lara calm with soothing conversation on camera angles and lighting, and the photogenic potential of the Shanty Town. I kept a special _Muffliato_ charm going around the two, keeping them from noticing the gunfight going on near the shrine, and in the other half of the town near the windmill. I didn't want Lara panicking and turning into her fire-form again, and Sam needed to keep Lara calm.

I was honestly, extremely worried about Lara.

Assuming the fire-form seemed to have drained her of almost all of her magic, and thus, strained her body immensely. A few subtle medical diagnostic spells when Sam wasn't paying attention told me that every single muscle in Lara's body was practically _swimming_ in lactic acid. Her bones had micro-fractures, the kind that occurs during extreme weight-lifting exercise. Her tendons were all stretched, and her ligaments all had a small tear or ten. The only reason why she wasn't screaming in agony, was her magic, already refilling at a fantastical rate, was soothing the pain, and healing her body. Or trying to, at least.

Sam was helping Lara to remain standing, let alone walk towards the shrine, where gunfire was quickly dropping in intensity.

Probably the most terrifying part of this whole experience, was the fact that I couldn't identify why, or how, Lara had become a being of fire. On top of that, I couldn't think of a single being, magical or otherwise, that would produce green flames in the manner that Lara did so instinctively. Veela flames are blue. Passion flames are pink. Fiendfyre is demonic red. But I couldn't think of anything that produced green fire!

I'm going to have to research this at a later date.

For now though, I needed to ask Roth and Reyes about what they'd found in the shrine, seeing as how they'd remained there, even after killing the last of the Solarii that had ambushed them.

"What've we got?" I asked, drawing Roth and Reyes' eyes off Lara and Sam, who were busy remarking on the iconography on the outside of the shrine.

"These bastards seem to love crucifying people that come in off the wrecks." Roth stated quietly. "There's some poor bastard strung up in there. There's also some loose floor boards covering up a tunnel. Think we should check it out?"

"Not now." I stated, nodding towards Lara. "No telling what's in there. Mark it on the map. We'll come back to it when Lara's better, she's the only expert on archeology and history here. We'll need her to tell us what we're looking at."

"Got it." Roth nodded.

Reyes pulled out the map of the island we'd gotten from Matthias's office in the palace, and squatted down to work on it with Roth's help. Meanwhile, I moved towards the shrine, motioning for Sam and Lara to stay put. Lara tried to come anyways, but her legs buckled, and she pulled Sam to the ground with her. At Sam's reassuring nod, I continued into the shrine, where, sure enough, there was a man of indeterminate origins strung up on a shabby, makeshift cross. Throwing a flame-repelling ward over the shrine, I set the man's body on fire, wishing I could give him a better send off, but knowing that I never could.

After the man finished burning, I Vanished the ashes, and Scourgified the blood from the walls before moving back outside. Roth and Reyes both seemed to be debating and adding details to the rather large map, while Lara appeared to be drifting off to sleep in Sam's arms.

"We'll stay here for a few hours." I announced. "Let Lara rest a little before we continue on."

There were murmurs of assent, and then I set about making a small campfire there in front of the shrine.

Once I was done, I looked at my watch, the same one Mrs. Weasley had given me so many years ago, and saw that it was very nearly dinner time.

"Actually, we'll stay the night here." I said, loud enough for Roth and Reyes to hear me, where they were still pouring over the map. "It's late enough, no need for us to go exploring in the middle of the night and end up killed because we didn't see the edge of a cliff."

"Good enough for me." Sam chirped.

Roth grunted, and Reyes didn't even acknowledge me, but I simply shrugged and set about erecting the same ward scheme that Hermione, Ron, and I had used when we were hunting Voldemort's Horcruxes. I'd added to it over the years, additional spells, traps, and such that I'd picked up, both from studying ancient ward schemes, and from Gringotts' best Curse Breaker, Bill Weasley. I'd had several jobs over the years that required me to bring help with me, and the fact that I was already friends with the best Curse Breaker Gringotts had to offer was only a coincidence I didn't mind calling in every now and again. Of course, that was tempered by me making sure he made it home in one piece. A pissed off Fleur Weasley had successfully managed to impress Mrs. Weasley when I'd brought Bill home once, missing his right pinky and ring fingers, and I had decided right then that I'd rather avoid getting lit on fire with Veela flames. Seeing it devour the chair in the Burrow that was magically reinforced to support Hagrid's weight in a few seconds had certainly impressed upon me just how dangerous Fleur could truly be when she let her heritage show.

"What was that?" Sam asked, once I finished erecting the wards, while leaving a hole in them that only Alex and Jonah could find.

"That, was me setting up a ward scheme." I explained.

"Oh!" Sam beamed. "Those! I've been reading about them, they seem so interesting!"

"Any questions about them?" I asked, not anticipating many. Despite how intelligent Sam was, she was definitely the less academically inclined of my two apprentices, so I figured that if she had any questions, they would be few, and fairly shallow in explanation needed.

Oh, how wrong I was.

 **So, the spell that Jonah used, is this:**

 **Tiaki o te Moana te Atua – Shield of the Ocean God**

 **I realize that a lot of my translations in my stories are** _ **probably**_ **not the best, but if anyone knows a good website that gives** _ **accurate**_ **translations, it would be much appreciated.**

 **And once again, thank you to everyone who reads and reviews, and please, leave a review for this latest chapter! Constructive criticism, and even outright praise is always appreciated! I will try to get the next chapter up on time.**


	15. Ch 15 The Shrine

**Unfortunately, I did not get as much writing on this story done as I wanted this month. Doesn't stop me from posting this chapter, but I think I'm getting close to the point where I'll be uploading chapters after I finish them and get them checked over. Tactition101 was kind enough to do so, you guys should check out his work, he does some pretty awesome stuff. It is currently eight in the morning for me, and I've been up since 6:45 working on one of my NSFW works, the story in question being a gift for a friend.**

 **Anyways, this chapter has some action in it, and we get to see a bit of the Lara we know from the games… if slightly augmented. Not that way, ya perv.**

 **Also, a bit of magical theory. What can I say? I like theorizing about things that don't exist. Anyways, here's the story**

The next morning, Lara seemed to be mostly back to normal, though I told her to hold off on the spell casting for a while. She was, at first, reluctant, until I pointed her in the direction of the tunnel in the shrine we were camped outside of. Then she was enthusiastic as all get out, and almost bolted down the tunnel, until Sam strapped a GoPro to Lara's forehead, and told her to go slow enough for the frame-rate to keep up, whatever that meant. The fact that I didn't even know that the GoPro was a camera was certainly a startling revelation at how small cameras were now, and a reminder of how out of touch I'd become with the nonmagical world.

"This is incredible!" Lara exclaimed. "Parts of this tunnel look natural, but others appear to be manmade!"

"How can you tell?" Sam asked.

"Look at the striations on the walls." Lara said, rubbing one hand on said surface. "Signs of chisels are all over these walls, probably to make it large enough for people to walk down. Of course, the supports have collapsed farther in, so it's no longer quite as roomy in here, but for the most part, this passageway is in amazingly good shape.

"What does the white paint on the walls signify?" I asked. It seemed… out of place, perhaps, though even more out of place were the bottles and cans of various types of alcohol along one side of the passageway.

"I'm not totally sure!" Lara said, and I could help but raise an eyebrow at the cheerfulness of her answer. "Obviously, since they're still _white_ , they weren't made thousands of years ago, which means the Solarii has been in here, but why they would waste white paint on making hand prints and a motif of a mountain, I have no idea."

"And… the skulls?" Sam asked sardonically as we passed a couple of poles, each one with two human skulls stuck on them.

"Thousands of years old." Lara waved off, and I was idly concerned over her rather blasé attitude towards the rather gruesome display. "Anything that's not clay, just assume it's a lot newer. I'm guessing that there are entire eras of human civilization progression missing on this island. What I've seen so far though, tells me that until the colonization days of Great Britain, ships were blown here by pure chance before Himiko's storms grabbed a hold of them. I didn't really see many ships older than the early colonization age out at the beach, though that may be because they've already decomposed and fallen beneath the waves."

"Now there's a thought." I muttered idly.

Just then, we came to a small section of passage illuminated by sunlight, leaking through a small hole in the ceiling, partially guarded by some tree roots. There was a rather deep crevice in front of us, but there were a couple of sturdy planks of wood spanning the gap.

I transfigured it into a proper bridge anyways. Who knew when the last time they'd been used was. Or how long they'd been out rotting there.

"Thank you!" Lara chirped happily, actually having the audacity to _pat my cheek_ before crossing the newly made bridge confidently. Sam smiled at me, and mimicked the action, before bouncing happily up to Lara, who was already descending a metal ladder that had been bolted into a cliff face.

I shook my head and followed them, a ball of light idly thrown into the air where it cast a soft white illumination over the cavern. I ended up having to transfigure another ladder down to the next level of the cavern, where we saw more skulls on poles through them, but Lara walked right past them without so much as a glance, intent on moving through the crack in the cave that my light showed us.

"Wait a second, Lara." I said, reaching out and grabbing her shoulder.

My scar was… prickling.

Despite being checked by no less than two dozen various "experts" on soul magic, and being told that there was absolutely no remnant of Voldemort's Horcrux in my scar, it was still rather… sensitive, whenever I was near soul magic.

I'd paid the goblins rather good money to get them to teach me how to detect soul magic in ways _other_ than using my head as a glorified compass needle. Paid more to be taught all of the other Curse Breaker skills, too.

"You feel something?" Sam asked. I idly wondered if she'd always been so intuitive, or if it was something she was learning from me, or even Lara.

"Yeah." I nodded slowly, sliding the Elder Wand out of its sheath on my left arm. "My scar's prickling. Only does that whenever I'm near some form of soul magic. I'm going to test for wards. You two need to back away, just in case."

I looked at them, just in time to see Sam and Lara exchange worried glances, before they slowly backed up to the transfigured ladder. I figured that was the best I was going to get, and turned back to the task at hand.

Curse Breaking is more an art, than a science, much like Ward Building. Though there was plenty of Arithmancy involved, and Hermione would insist that both were more of the latter than the former due to that fact alone. You needed a set of defenses that you wanted, in Ward Building. All of their effects, their strengths, built-in weaknesses for the customer to get in and out of them without setting them off, and dozens of other considerations. Then some poor sod had to sit down and work out what order to apply them in, how far apart, how potent in relation to the others, and dozens of other intricacies designed to maximize the effects desired by the customer.

Masters of the art could do without the poor sod bit though. Hell, Dumbledore was fairly infamous in the Ward Building circle still, just because he was one of a dozen people in the world at the time that could be given a list of desired wards, and turn around and apply them perfectly.

That was also why Curse Breakers were such a wanted commodity in Egypt. Ancient Egyptians were thorough, effective, vindictive, nasty, and downright cruel at times in their ward schemes.

And those were the benevolent rulers that had gotten to die of old age.

Himiko, on the other hand…

Himiko seemed to be the definition of jealousy, vindictiveness, and cruelty. And she had nearly five thousand years to come up with increasingly horrendous curses and wards, and a veritably limitless supply of magic to implement them with.

Plus, she's most likely _completely_ insane, having been stuck in one place for five thousand years. Never underestimate insanity.

However, I… didn't detect anything in the chamber beyond. Which was highly confusing. No wards that I could detect, and I ran the gamut on detection spells three times to be sure, but… nothing. Not even an alert ward.

I got a ping when I started on the dark magic detection spells, and I got the Elder Wand to whistle cheerfully when I detected soul magic. After that, I began refining my dark magic detection spells, until I figured out _what_ , exactly, we were going to be dealing with.

All in all, the process took me a good hour, during which time Sam and Lara seemed to have fallen into hushed conversation, though, when I turned back to look at them, I figured it to be more of interview, given the fact that Sam had her camera out and recording as Lara talked.

"We're clear." I called out, voice echoing in the cave a bit. The two girls got up and came closer, though Sam didn't put away her camera. "I didn't detect any wards, which means this is either some place totally unimportant to Himiko, or she was confident enough in her outer defenses that she didn't bother erecting wards here."

"Well, that's good." Lara perked up, stepping forward to move towards the crack in the wall.

"Wait." I said, catching her across her stomach with an outstretched arm. "Just because there aren't any wards, doesn't mean that it's safe."

Lara snorted.

"What, Himiko set up a body guard in there or something?"

"Something like that." I said seriously, which wiped the bemused expression off her face.

"Any idea what kind?" Sam asked.

"The undead kind." I sighed. "The _not human_ undead kind."

The cave was silent, and I wondered at the looks Lara and Sam exchanged. I didn't feel like peering into their heads to figure it out though.

"Do you think it would react to a non-magic user?" Lara asked.

I blinked.

"What do you mean?" I wondered. Where was she going with this?

"Obviously, the Solarii were in here at some point." Lara said, gesturing to the chamber beyond. "I can see the bottles of alcohol from here. Given the fact that I can't see any blood stains, I think it's safe to say that they voluntarily abandoned this place for whatever reason they had, if Himiko didn't just mind control them into leaving. Given the fact that, in our conversations on magical culture, you've been implying that magicals don't normally travel the way non-magicals do, I think it's safe to say we're the first magical people on this island in hundreds, possibly _thousands_ of years. If we go about looking through this tomb as if we were nothing more than people incapable of using magic, do you think it's possible we won't attract the attention of the guardian in here?"

I frowned, thinking about it.

"It's… possible." I admitted grudgingly. "Definitely possible."

"Well, let's try it." Sam shrugged, though her camera remained perfectly stable. Really remarkable, that.

"Very well." I sighed. "I'll go first."

And with that, I conjured three torches, lit them with a quick _incendio_ , and then turned and marched to the crack in the wall, hiding the chamber beyond from us.

After I stepped through, the first thing I noticed, was the fact that I didn't actually _need_ the torch, due to the hole in the ceiling. Lara stepped right next to me a second later.

" _Wow._ " She breathed.

I looked over, and was momentarily dazzled by the look of unadulterated happiness and excitement on her face.

I was faintly reminded of when I'd taken Hermione to visit the Library of Alexandria in Egypt, a few years back.

"Look at this!" Lara exclaimed, scrambling forward, and I was reluctant to let her go, when I knew that there was danger here. But, Sam breezed right past me, throwing an amused grin over her shoulder at me as she went.

"This statue is in _fantastic_ shape!" Lara exclaimed, running straight up the small mound directly in front of us. "Who knows how long the water has been cascading down onto this statue, but it looks like it was just carved!"

I walked up more slowly, keeping a wary eye on our surroundings.

 _Whump_.

I whirled around, taking in the shocked expression on Lara's face, one hand outstretched and _touching the statue_.

"Lara?" Sam asked, and she suddenly looked fairly pale. "Please tell me you didn't just use magic?"

"I-I-I didn't!" Lara exclaimed, backing away, eyes darting to and fro as her hand pulled her pistol out of its holster on her thigh.

Sam did the same, though she kept the camera out, and I idly wondered if she expected to be able to record and fight at the same time.

"Back to back." I commanded, turning around to face the metal grating that made an artificial floor a few feet below the mound of dirt we were currently standing on.

"Yes Master." The girls chorused, and I felt faintly reassured when I felt their shoulders press against mine.

" _HISSSS-SS-SS-SS-SS-SS-SS-SS-CH-CH-CH-CH-CH-CH."_

I blinked, staring down through the grates, and wondering if my ears had deceived me.

"What was that?" Sam asked, fear _very_ apparent in her voice.

Not that I could miss her shaking.

Or Lara's for that matter.

Or was that me?

"That…" I said softly. "Sounded like a _bloody_ fucking _huge_ water drake."

"W-water drake?" Lara whimpered.

' _This is_ really _not good.'_ I thought to myself. _'But I can't afford to be nice right now.'_

"Imagine one of those Chinese depictions of dragons." I muttered. "On average, about forty, fifty feet long, when full grown, with a diameter of about four feet right behind the head. Magically enhanced bacterial poison, so try to avoid getting bitten."

"Right." Sam said sardonically. "Of course, the monster has halitosis."

 **BOOM**!

"I don't think it liked that comment." Lara said, and I could feel her easing away from me before I saw her pistol creep into my line of sight, pointing directly at the grating. Sam did the same a few seconds later.

"However," I said with false lightness. "If my dark magic detection earlier was correct, then this thing has been dead for _quite_ a while. Which means, it's rather susceptible to enchanted fire."

"Too bad our walking match-stick is out of juice." Sam quipped, and I glanced over at her, wondering if I was going to have to worry about her snapping. But, instead, I could see that her face was still _distinctly_ pale, and she was probably just missing her brain to mouth filter. Not that it made much difference, I supposed.

"Still enough to make you bald." Lara grouched. And yep, still pretty pale as well. Though, I could feel determination welling up inside of her, slowly, but it was growing.

Merlin save me from bloody Gryffindors.

 **BANG!**

The grating trembled, and I managed to catch a brief glimpse of the monster trying to get to us.

"Please tell me you two managed to see what that was." Sam pleaded softly. "You two with your crazy super-senses."

"Y-yeah." Lara said breathlessly.

My assumption was correct, and I was _not_ happy about it.

"Undead water drake, alright." I sighed. "And it looks like Himiko might've juiced this one up before it died."

"Juiced up?" Sam asked. "How do you _mean_ , juiced up?"

"It could probably swallow one of us whole." Lara said.

"Probably immune to most curses that would be effective against it, even with it being undead." I added helpfully.

 **BANG! SHREIK!**

"And that's the metal giving way." I added, right before the cage I'd been ignoring flew towards the ceiling, impacted with a squeal of tortured metal, and then fell to the metal floor in front of us with a crash. "And I guess it decided to have a pre-dinner snack. Lovely."

"Please don't joke about that." Lara and Sam chorused.

"Sorry."

 **BOOM!**

And with that, the drake managed to break through the metal flooring, and the cage went flying overhead.

 **CRACK!**

I felt my eyes go wide, because this was _not_ good.

"Sam, put the camera somewhere safe if you want to still record." I ordered, and felt her scramble towards the entrance. Then she scrambled back, and prepared for battle.

 **CRACK! CRACKLE CRUNCH!**

I closed my eyes.

"Please tell me the giant statue of Himiko is _not_ moving." I sighed.

"Oh, it's moving alright." Lara said shakily. "And so is the _other_ giant statue of Himiko."

My eyes flew open, and I turned my head fast enough to crack the joints, and took in the _second_ statue opposite the one Lara had touched.

" _Piertotum locomotor_." I breathed.

And didn't _that_ bring back memories.

The suits of armor in Hogwarts… they were always moving around, when I had been a student there. Sometimes, you could hear them clanking from one position in the castle to another, though I couldn't think of anyone who had ever actually _seen_ them moving. Until the Final Battle.

But they hadn't been the _only_ things in the castle designed to defend it. There had been stone statues of suits of armor as well, complete with stone weaponry, seemingly innocuous.

During the final battle, McGonagall had cast a spell that was only loosely in the Transfiguration family of spells. _Piertotum locomotor._ A spell that animated objects into facsimiles of life.

She'd used it on the chess set from first year.

She'd used it on the stone statues in Hogwarts during the Final Battle.

Nobody had seen a statue, or a suit of armor, move since that day.

And now, facing off against _giant_ stone statues, likely animated in some similar fashion to the spell, I could suddenly appreciate how the Death Eaters had likely felt when the army of statues and suits of armor had marched out to meet them on the perimeter of Hogwarts.

I don't think I like it.

"Can you two keep the statues off me while I try to deal with the water drake?" I asked lightly.

"Sure," Sam drawled. "Because bullets against statues is _such_ an even playing field."

"Just shut up and shoot, Sam." Lara barked, and her pistol cracked out deafeningly. I heard stone shatter, and Lara complained under her breath. "Damn, and these statues were in such good condition, too."

After that, I had to dodge a stone fist, before dodging again to avoid the water drake's lunge.

It rather reminded me of fighting the basilisk in the Chamber. Just, without Tom Riddle mocking me.

Although, the constant ringing of pistol fire from Sam and Lara, and the cracking of statues and the shrieking of the water drake was plenty distracting. It didn't help that floor space was a precious commodity, between the two twenty foot tall statues, me, Lara, and Sam, and trying to find enough space to dodge the two statues, and the water drake, _and_ each other… I needed to finish this, fast, before one of us gets hurt, even through the enchantments I'd laid on us.

" _Terra medii aevi!"_ I cried, slinging the Elder Wand through the air towards the drake's body.

The ground rumbled, and then slid forward, turning the mound of dirt around us into a more even floor throughout the chamber, conveniently forcing the drake to remain in place, relatively speaking. Conveniently, the shifting earth unbalanced the two statues attacking Sam and Lara, but they were also unbalanced by the spell.

" _Incendio maxima!"_ I shouted, and a gout of flame burst from my wand, striking the drake near where I'd trapped it in the earth.

It _shrieked_.

And then proceeded to bat me aside with its head, faster than I could react.

"Ouch." I hissed under my breath.

"Harry!" Lara yelled. "We have a problem!"

"I see three right now, which one are _you_ talking about?!" I bellowed.

"The statues are repairing themselves!" Sam shrieked, narrowly avoiding getting pummeled by a hammer fist from one of the statues.

And what do you know, she's right. I can see rock chips skittering up the statues before settling back into place. Which means that, if we can't get rid of them, we'll eventually get tired, and get hit by them.

I was confident in the protective spells I'd laid on the girls, but the problem is that my spells are finite. They can only take so much punishment before they fail, just like any spell cast by any other witch or wizard. These statues… I think they may be an integrated part of the ward system of the island itself, which is why I didn't detect them before Lara activated them by accident. Which, if they _are_ a part of the island ward scheme, these things are going to be able to move and repair themselves potentially indefinitely. Not good. On the other hand, who knows what kind of enchantments have been laid on the drake, besides the obvious Inferi-making-analogue curse.

Looking around, I looked for anything resembling a control key. Control keys helped specify the areas certain wards took effect in. Because, if this _was_ a system that was part of the island wards, then _every_ statue of Himiko would've been animated on the island. That would've been… very much not good.

" _Hiss-ss-ss-ss-ss-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch!"_ the water drake reared back, looking down at me mightily.

And I blinked.

There, behind the drake's head, was a third statue of Himiko. It was toppled slightly, leaning against the alcove it sat in, and there, faintly glowing, was the carved stone crown on Himiko's head.

"Of _fucking_ course, it's all the way up there." I muttered.

" _Sam, Lara, listen up."_ I said, opening up the mental connection between us to talk to them.

" _A bit busy!"_ Sam protested.

" _It had better be damned good!"_ Lara said in turn, right after she avoided being punted across the cavern by a statue.

" _Which one of you is good at rock climbing?"_ I asked desperately, even as I scrambled to dodge another lunge from the drake, taking care to make sure it didn't strike my two apprentices as I did so. The fact that it took an arm off one of the statues was merely a bonus.

" _Me."_ Lara said shortly, narrowly ducking beneath a grasping hand. _"Why do you ask_ now _of all times?"_

" _Because there's a third statue of Himiko up on the wall."_ I explained shortly. _"Suffice to say, there's a controller of sorts on the statue up there. The crown. I'm good, but I can't defend myself from the drake,_ and _shoot a disruption spell at the control key."_

" _So, you need someone to climb up there, and disrupt the key."_ Sam noted. _"How will that help us?"_

" _The control key… I managed to get a glimpse of some of the kanji on it. One of them looks like a precursor to the modern day kanji for 'repair'."_ I said. _"If we can get you, Lara, to get up there and destroy the control key, the statues will stop repairing themselves, and you and Sam can use some_ bombarda's _to destroy the two animated statues."_

" _I thought I was forbidden from using magic until further notice."_ Lara pointed out.

" _Further notice."_ I said dryly.

" _Good enough for me!"_

And suddenly, Lara blew past me, leaping up onto a small platform, probably made by the Solarii, leaving Sam and me against two stone statues, and an oversized, undead water drake.

"I hate you." Sam drawled, her back suddenly pressed up against mine. "Can I use magic too?"

The tone of voice she asked that in was entirely too sweet.

"Fire away." I said. _"Incendio maxima!"_

" _Bombarda!"_ Sam bellowed, and a cacophony of noise assaulted my ears as the drake screeched in pain, and an explosion rocked the cavern, echoing horrendously.

 _Plink!_

I looked up, just in time to see Lara dangling from the third Himiko statue, holding onto a climbing axe I was certain she had conjured. A second one appeared in her other hand, and she slammed it into the statue as well with another _plink!_

The two stone statues behind me lumbered in Lara's direction, and I knew Sam and I had to stop them before they could grab Lara, drake be damned. The statues were large enough that they could reach up and grab Lara's legs, despite the fact that she was very nearly thirty feet off the ground.

" _Lara, climb faster!"_ Sam suddenly shouted in my mind. _"Master, reverse that earth moving spell from earlier when the statues are over the pit!"_

I blinked, realizing the simple genius of the idea, and waited in tense silence as the drake began looking at the stone statues, as if it couldn't decide if they were friend or foe.

And that hesitation was all I needed, because, just then, the statues were over the covered pit, and Lara was safely out of their gripping range.

" _Tera medii aevi!"_ I bellowed, and suddenly, the earth keeping the drake's body in place whirled out of the way, like water draining in reverse, and the statues collapsed on top of the drake. It screeched in pain as stone fingers gouged deep into its undead flesh, and it began biting the statues, partially rotted teeth snapping off like brittle glass.

"NOW WHAT DO I DO?!" Lara bellowed from above.

"COVER YOUR HEAD AND SMASH THE DAMNED KANJI TO PIECES!" I bellowed back.

" _Bombarda!"_ Lara yelled, and I watched in no little amount of horrified shock as Lara set off an exploding curse _right above her head!_

There was a thump of magic, and then the statues grew still, their stone fingers dug deep into the drake. The drake continued attacking them though, not seeming to care about us anymore, for which I was grateful. Hopefully, I could use some regular, if overpowered, fire spells to incinerate it now.

"Lara, sweetie?" Sam called out into the relative silence.

"… I'm here, Sam." Lara said after a moment.

I sighed in relief.

"The spells on you hold up?" I hollered.

"Yeah." Lara said, dropping down and using one of the statues as a spring board to jump closer to me and Sam. She rolled when she hit the ground, and popped up in a standing position, absolutely _covered_ in rock dust.

"Well, that's one way to do it." Sam remarked, before turning around and marching towards the entrance. I turned to watch her, confused, until I saw her pick up her camera, which was somehow still in one piece, and judging by the smile on her face and the happiness I felt through the bond, still functioning.

"So, can we light the giant worm on fire now?" Lara asked.

"Sam and I will." I said, giving her a reprimanding look. " _You_ are back on restrictions."

"Yes, Master." Lara pouted

"Pull out your wand, Sam." I commanded, and watched her hand the camera off to Lara, who took it with seemingly good grace. She stepped off to the side, camera pointed at me and Sam now, as Sam came to stand next to me, her wand in hand.

"Incendio maxima?" she asked.

"Yes." I nodded. "However, instead of merely throwing a fireball at it, I want you to just imagine a flamethrower. And keep it on the drake until I tell you to stop."

"Yes, Master." Sam said.

I flicked my holly wand into my right hand, keeping the Elder wand in my left, and raised them both, Sam mimicking me with her wand.

" _Incendio maxima!"_ we cried together, and three gouts of flame slammed into the drake, which began screeching in protest.

"Careful of the artifacts!" Lara cried out. "I want to study them!"

I frowned, and sent out a wave of my magic to wrap around everything that wasn't stone, keeping everything from burning.

It took almost fifteen minutes of constant fire before the drake stopped screeching, and after that, Sam and I simply let the poor thing burn on its own, its magical defenses finally overwhelmed. I kept a careful eye on it anyways, because it was never a good idea to leave an enemy at your back if you could help it.

"So." Sam chirped, as all three of us collapsed on the floor, staring at the burning drake. "Do you think the whole island is going to be like this?"

"Don't even joke about that." Lara sighed.

"I don't know." I admitted. "I'm beginning to think that maybe I should've brought a professional Curse Breaker with me."

"I thought you said you had a friend that was a professional Curse Breaker?" Lara questioned. "Didn't you say that he taught you everything you know about Curse Breaking?"

I paused for a second.

"I… don't think I ever _told_ either of you that." I said slowly.

I exchanged looks with the girls. Thankfully, they looked just as perturbed as I felt. We sat in silence, watching the drake burn, and after the last of it was burnt to ashes, I stood, dusting my rear off as I did so, and looking up towards the semi-hidden level that Lara had leapt up to in her quest for stopping the statues.

Speaking of…

"Sam, levitate the statues out of the pit, please?" I asked. She stood, and frowned at the statues, holding out her wand in her right hand, and raising her arms like a concert conductor.

" _Windgardium leviosa!"_ she intoned sternly, moving through a perfect swish and flick, and with a grumble, the smoke and soot blackened statues were levitated out of the pit they'd fallen into.

" _Terra medii aevi."_ I said, and this time, I was slower with the spell, turning the dirt into much sturdier rock, leaving small grates near where the water was falling from the ceiling, tilting the new floor so that puddles wouldn't build up, and all the water would drain to the grates. Then I transfigured the rock into pure granite.

"Alright Sam, you can put them down now." I said, and she nodded before slowly lowering her wand, the statues following her movements until they leant against the walls. "Now I'm going to animate them, and make them go back to how they were _before_ Lara accidentally set them off."

The girls nodded, though Lara did look a little disgruntled, and they came to stand near me again.

" _Piertotum locomotor."_

And with more cracking and groaning of stone, the two statues of Himiko lumbered back to where they belonged, adopting the poses they'd been in when we entered the chamber, and then stilled as my spell finished its pre-set directives.

"Well, let's go up and see what we're dealing with." Lara chirped brightly.

Damned girl's going to get us killed with her archaeology shenanigans…

 _ **Terra medii aevi**_ **\- roughly "average earth level"**

 **And that's the chapter folks! Hit that review button, let me know what you think! I'm sorry I stopped responding to individual reviews in these Author's Notes, but it was getting to be a bit much, so I'm sorry about that. Just know that I appreciate everybody's reviews, and I'm doing my best to implement the constructive criticism that some of you have given to me. Later!**


	16. Ch 16 The Magic of The Shrine

**Sorry for the delay on this chapter folks! Had a commission I had to work on, on the other side of the internet that actually made me money, so that delayed things, along with the stereotypical Independence Day celebration every true American enjoys to their own detriment in some manner. LMAO.**

 **Anywho, here's this chapter for y'all. Not much action in it, and I can't remember if I was tipsy or just had a migraine when I wrote this chapter, but it's kinda squirrely. So I hope y'all brought your thinking caps today to be able to keep up with the shenanigans in this chapter.**

"So, what are we looking at?" Harry asked, once we were up in the ancient shrine above the former pit.

"Judging by the script here," I said, running my hands over the ancient kanji on the walls. "This is a shrine one of her head priestesses built… to honor Himiko's tears? Maybe…"

"Maybe a shrine to the storms Himiko whipped up?" Sam asked.

"Possibly." I hesitated to agree, but, it would make a bit of sense. "People were really superstitious back then, so it's possible that this was built originally to give thanks to her for the prosperous rainfall she brought to the island. Farmers and livestock owners were probably the predominant contributors of all these coins and minor jewelry. Maybe the occasional wealthy person to give thanks for constant clean water?"

"All possibilities." Harry hummed. "However, what about these two statues? They're solid gold."

"And more statues of my crazed ancestor." Sam deadpanned. "Great. She was _really_ vain, wasn't she?"

"Judging by the number of statues we've seen thus far?" I shot back, continuing to move closer to the gold statues as I perused the carvings on the wall. "I'd say yes. At least, this means you come by your vanity honestly."

"Hey!" Sam protested. "It's one thing to know you're beautiful, it's an entirely different thing to have _solid gold statues_ of yourself made."

"Enough." Harry chided. "Sam, shrink the chest of valuables, put it somewhere safe."

"Got it." Sam said, and I turned, only to blink as I realized that there was, indeed, a wooden chest with gold corners and hinges sitting between the two statues of Himiko, very nearly overflowing with gold, jewelry, shields, a sword, and who knew what else. However, it was swiftly shrunk, and slipped into the moleskin pouch around Sam's neck a moment later. That was also when I realized that Harry was looking rather intently at the two statues.

"What's wrong?" I asked him, putting a hand on his shoulder.

"Did you know that gold is one of the best materials to apply spells to?" he asked, instead of replying to my own question. "It, along with silver and bronze, are utilized as the currency world-wide in the magical world. All three are able to be impregnated with complex spells, and hold them practically permanently. This allows the goblins, the species in charge of wizarding money, to put their own spells and counterfeit counter-measures onto the coins. There are, allegedly, nearly four to five dozen spells put onto each individual coin, however, the amount of galleons, sickles, and knuts that are made annually, is rather pitiful, due to both the complexity of the spells applied to them, and the fact that the goblins are _very_ efficient at managing sustainable inflation rates."

"And this has to do with these statues… how?" I asked, wondering if there was a point to Harry's sudden rambling.

"These statues are impregnated with a couple of _hundred_ spells." Harry said, and I couldn't stop myself from exchanging worried looks with Sam. "This is a ward relay point."

"And a ward relay point is, what, exactly?" Sam asked my question for me.

"When a set of wards cover an exceptionally large area, they rely on ward relay points to keep the wards anchored in place, and continually remind the magic of what it is supposed to be doing. Shooing away animals, preserving statues, any number of things, in this case."

"So, we need to destroy the statues, and work on getting rid of the wards?" Sam asked. "Will that get rid of the storms that make up the Dragon's Triangle?"

"It would get rid of the storms." Harry nodded, and I felt a little lost. The abstract principles of magic still managed to befuddle me at times. "However, the Japanese Ministry of Magic doesn't want the wards taken down."

"What?" I snapped, trying to control my bewilderment at the multiple, random directions this conversation was going. "What does the Japanese Ministry of Magic have to do with this?"

"Think about this, Lara," Harry said, finally turning his back on the golden statues. "Pretend, for a moment, that you still don't know magic exists. That you're just another girl in England. And suddenly, news snaps across the globe, with climatologists and weathermen panicking because the Dragon's Triangle just faded away, revealing a previously undiscovered island that shows signs of previous civilization, nearly five thousand years old."

"… So… I'd probably do my best to get here, in that case." I shrugged.

"Except for one problem." Harry shook his head. "While you're on your way to the island, you hear word that, despite satellite GPS, ultra-detailed maps, and who knows what other kinds of navigational methods, no sailor is able to find the island, or they keep sailing away from it, thinking that they have something more important to do. People can see the island on satellite imagery, but can't see it with their own eyes when they're allegedly a mile or so from the island."

"Magic would be revealed to the world." Sam breathed.

"And in one of the worst possible ways." Harry nodded, and I was beginning to see what he meant. The world would try to find out what the hell the island was. They'd go out of their way to find out, getting increasingly desperate, until, eventually, something broke, either the new wards, or somebody died trying to get to the island.

"I see what you mean." I admitted, still not too fond of the thought of leaving these wards up if they were acting against us.

"On top of that," Harry said. "The Dragon's Triangle's continuous storms and typhoons has been happening for nearly five thousand years now. It's an integrated part of the weather cycle of the globe, and most likely a safe point for who knows how many types of marine life to come and feed or breed. Among other things. No, the Dragon's Triangle _needs_ to remain intact. If only to preserve world climate balance."

"Jeez." Sam sighed. "So, we can't take the wards down. But we can't leave them up to work against us. What are we going to do?"

"To be totally honest, I have an idea that I am hesitant to implement." Harry said, and I idly wondered just what idea would make him hesitant.

"Well, what's this idea of yours?" Sam demanded.

"It's a pretty bad idea."

"Harry…" I chided. "Just tell us."

"… Alright." Harry sighed. "Instead of tying the wards to a ward master stone, it appears that Himiko tied the wards to two things. Her soul. And her blood."

"And the ward master stone is something that controls and makes the wards?" I asked, trying to clarify what he meant by it."

"Yes…?" Harry offered. "Think of the wards as a dome-shaped spider's web, with the ward master stone at the center. The stone is the spider, and the web is the wards. Spiders can feel when something comes into contact with their webs, and nearly instantaneously respond to it. The ward master stone is more complicated, however, because it draws power from the surroundings, although locations above ley lines can draw from the ley lines, which makes it like an additional web strand. On top of _that_ , the ward stone dictates the effects and the wards on the area, while also acting as a redirection point so that when one sensory ward is tripped, the appropriate _response_ ward is triggered."

"That sounds… way too complicated." I shook my head.

"Trust me, I'm simplifying it as much as I can, but it's even more complex than that." Harry shrugged. "Hermione could probably explain it more simply than I can, but the fact is that this is extremely sensitively balanced magic."

"Okay, so what's your solution?" Sam asked.

"Like I said before, the wards are tied to Himiko's soul, and her blood." Harry explained. "Her soul is trapped in a body, somewhere on this island, the Storm Guard and the Solarii were practically playing Capture the Flag with the body, and the Storm Guard had it last before we butchered them and the Solarii. But… Sam has the blood of Himiko's original body flowing through her veins."

"… What?" I blinked. Sometimes I wish Harry's mind wasn't so screwy. It seemed like he had no linear thought processes at times…

"Yeah, I'm with Lara on this one, what?" Sam shifted next to me, obviously uncomfortable.

"Sam is a descendant of Himiko's original body." Harry said, looking at us like we were particularly dim.

"Yeah." Sam agreed. "And?"

Harry sighed, dropping his face into one hand.

" _So_ , I can change who the wards are controlled by." Harry said slowly, pointing directly at Sam. "However, between the fact that we have to keep the wards up, and Himiko's going to be trying to bring control of the wards fully back to herself, we're going to be fighting an uphill battle."

"… Can you simplify this?" Sam asked.

Harry sighed again, and I could feel an echo of sheer frustration leaking into my mind from him.

"Alright." Harry stated, slightly harshly. "This is a ward relay point. Correct?"

"Correct." Sam and I said together, and I realized with a start that the Apprenticeship was forcing us to reply together once again.

"The relay point is anchored to Himiko's soul and blood, correct?" Harry continued.

"Correct." We said again.

"Sam has Himiko's blood, correct?"

"Correct."

"We can change the ward relay point's allegiance from Himiko, to Sam, understood?"

"… Understood." Sam and I said after a moment.

"Is it really that simple?" I asked, before Harry could continue.

Harry snorted. "Simple, she asks. It's easier said than done."

"Of course it is." Sam chirped. "But, won't Himiko be fighting us for control of this relay point?"

"If she could, she would." Harry said.

"Oh please, not more confusing talk about things that aren't logical." I groaned, putting my hand to my forehead even as I gazed up at the ceiling above me.

"Once we transfer control of this relay point to Sam, I can add a spell to the relay point that will deactivate anything controlled by Himiko once it enters the area of influence affected by the relay point Sam now controls." Harry said. "And on top of that, we can seal off this cave so any Solarii remnants can't get to it to destroy the relay point."

"So, what are we waiting for?" Sam asked, though I could _definitely_ feel her apprehension and slight fear at what we were about to do.

"I need your blood." Harry said grimly. "And Lara, I need you to show me how Sam's _full_ name would look in this dialect that everything is written in, here."

Sam's gulp was audible, and I couldn't help but bring her into a small, half-hearted half-hug that she returned, before stepping forward to expose her left wrist to Harry.

"I won't need much." He said. "Do you give this blood to me, to change the allegiance of this ward relay point to you, Samantha Maria Nishimura, of your own free will?"

"I do." My best friend said.

I felt a subtle shift of magic, then a second pulse as an obsidian knife appeared in Harry's hand.

"Then allow me to perform the actions necessary to do so." He said, holding out his empty hand, palm up. Sam rested her right hand in Harry's left, and he gently gripped it.

"Lara, Sam's name in ancient Japanese?" Harry suddenly asked, looking at me.

"Oh! Um, yes." I stumbled towards the two golden statues that were suddenly much more intimidating. Bringing a bit of magic to my right index finger, I raised it and circled the ancient kanji for Himiko's name in green fire, before using the same green fire to write Sam's full name in the same dialect. I did the same on the other statue, and then I stepped back, watching as Harry quickly drew the obsidian knife across Sam's hand, eliciting a wince from my best friend.

Then Harry began chanting.

It was… strange. His words echoed, his voice fairly _vibrating_ with power. And something that I found rather disturbing, was the fact that he was speaking a language that was sibilant and drawn out. It reminded me eerily of a snake's hiss, but I _knew_ that he was chanting. And as he chanted, he moved, slowly, towards the two statues of Himiko.

And while all of this was happening, there was a swelling of immense magic from Harry, growing ever greater, eventually pressing down on me like an oppressive weight.

 _And then Sam's blood started glowing like a damned torch._

Harry applied Sam's blood to the kanji for Himiko's name on her statues' crowns, and I watched in fascination as the kanji changed from "Himiko" to "Samantha Maria Nishimura", the gold flowing like some sort of half-solid water into its new shape. After a moment, Sam's blood sunk into the gold carving of her name, and I felt another pulse of magic practically _explode_ from the two statues, reverberating around the shrine we stood in, before pooling into Sam. She gasped, and I gasped in response, because Sam… suddenly looked more… vibrant. Like she'd just got back from one of her all-day-spa-trips that she did on her birthday every year. Her eyes glimmered, her hair shimmered, her skin looked glassy smooth, and she just looked… better.

" _Whoa_." Sam breathed.

Even her voice sounded better! How was that _fair_?!

"Do you have a grasp on the wards over this part of the island, Sam?" Harry asked, and I realized that, for the first time that I had ever witnessed, Harry was winded. Not much, not even enough to truly _count_ , but just barely enough for me to notice.

"Yeah." Sam whispered, and once more, I was struck with jealousy over the sound of her voice.

She could claim that I had a rocking bod, or whatever it was she said, but Sam had that exotic, foreign attractiveness that kept men flocking to her throughout uni. Not that I hadn't had my own paramours, but I was honestly jealous of Sam. Not enough to sour our longstanding relationship, but enough that it occasionally struck me, like it was now.

"Good." Harry said, breaking me out of my internal musings. "How's the information input?"

"It's… overwhelming." Sam said, and I realized with a start that she seemed a little… off. Like she wasn't fully paying attention to us.

"I'm… trying to figure out how to make certain things self-sustaining, so that I only have to check up on them every now and again, but it's… taking me longer than I want." Sam explained, and once more, I was made wary of the slightly vacuous look in her eyes.

"Do you want some help?" Harry asked, looking towards me.

"… Yes, please." Sam replied.

"Alright, let's sit down." Harry said, stepping closer to Sam once again.

I stepped closer to the two of them, and sat down, cross-legged like them.

"This will feel pretty weird." Harry said.

And then his magic washed over me, and everything went dark.


	17. Ch 17 Of Minds, Maps, and Palaces

**Hey folks, sorry for the super late update. Shit has been happening in life lately that has kept me super busy. As I've said earlier, I'm trying to write for a living now, but I barely made over $100 last month with writing commissions. At the very least, I** _ **did**_ **make money, but I need to make more, and I already finished another commission this month, and I have a couple more in the pipeline for me to write.**

 **All that said, this is the penultimate chapter that I already have done and edited, so unless something changes and I get more money on a more regular basis, writing fanfiction is going to be put on even more of a backburner than it already is.**

 **That said, I** _ **will**_ **be posting some snippets and story ideas on here under their own individual stories. Depending on how people respond to them, I might start rotating them all through my work cycle.**

 **Anyways, here's the chapter you've all been waiting for. Enjoy!**

When my vision came back to me, I realized that I was back on the floor of the shrine Harry, Sam, and I had just fought in.

"Ah, there you are, Lara."

I whirled around, breathing a sigh of relief when I saw Harry standing behind me, a supportive hand on Sam's shoulder.

"How did we get back down here so suddenly?" I asked.

"We didn't." Harry said, giving a smug smirk as he said this. "We're in Sam's mind."

"Or rather, the three dimensional representation of the warded area I now control, inside my mind." Sam clarified, also giving me a rather smug smirk.

I blinked a couple times, trying to understand that.

"… If we're inside your mind, then how am I here?" I asked, trying to wrap my… mind, around the idea that Harry and Sam were presenting me with.

"I dragged you in here." Harry said. "Technically speaking, _this_ is what I've been trying to push you two towards with the mind arts that I started teaching you last week."

"It is?" Sam asked, whipping around to look at Harry.

"Technically." Harry nodded. "And to answer your question, Lara, you're not actually _here_ , here, the body you're currently in is merely a mental projection of yourself within Sam's mindscape."

I paused.

While I preferred reading history books, and archaeology books in particular, I did like reading the occasional fiction book, so the concept of the mindscape wasn't… foreign to me. Plus watching Sherlock starring Benedict Cumberbatch… However, the idea of entering someone _else's_ mindscape… that's… crazy. But, I suppose, not at all outside the realms of possibility, what with magic thrown into the mix.

"… Okay." I said after a moment. "So, what's the lesson, and what are we doing?"

The approving smile I got from Harry brought a bit of heat to my cheeks, but I pushed it down harshly, and instead, waited for him to speak.

"The lesson, and the objective, is two-fold." Harry began. "The first thing we're going to do, is walk through the representation of the part of the island covered by the wards Sam now controls. As we do so, we're going to look at the magic that makes up those wards, and come up with an alert system that will tell Sam when something is going on in that area. Then, we're going to exit this representation, and take a look at Sam's mind palace. From there, we both will give her constructive criticism, and ideas of how to improve it. I honestly wanted to wait until one of you fell into your mindscape by accident, and then drag the other in to get a look at it, but this island keeps forcing my hands."

"It's alright." Sam shrugged. "Depending on how things go, I might just use this representation of the island as my mindscape. Merge the two, so to speak. Make it easier to sort my memories, and keep an eye on the wards."

"That's not a bad idea." I nodded.

"Maybe eventually." Harry denied, shaking his head. "A mindscape as big as this island would be difficult to maintain. On top of that, you'll have to know exactly where _every_ little thing is, from a grain of sand, all the way up to the mountains, and all of their cracks. Perfect memorization doesn't occur until your mind palace is fully developed, and all your previous memories have been sorted."

"… So maybe not right now." Sam smiled sheepishly.

"Not right now." Harry agreed.

"So, Sam, any idea on what all wards you just got control of?" I asked, unable to help my curiosity. After all, my friend is now connected to a chunk of five thousand year old magic! That's exciting to me!

Sam frowned, and Harry took a half step away from my friend to look at her straight on.

"Well…" She started. "It's… a bit of a mess. But, at the same time, it makes sense, sort of."

Then her face brightened.

"Oooh, I just had an idea!" she squealed. "Map!"

And then suddenly, there was a three dimensional, holographic _map_ of the valley we were currently in, complete with all the buildings we'd seen, a seemingly active river with waterfall, and even a functioning representation of the gondola transport system. It was even in full color!

"That's amazing, Sam!" I exclaimed, earning a bright smile from my friend.

"Interesting." Harry said, cupping his chin as he began circling the holographic map. "Is this you, or is this the wards?"

That wiped the smile off Sam's face. Then she frowned as she peered more closely at the map as well.

"A little bit of both." Sam admitted after a moment. "Like the format is me, but the details is the wards. I think it's something rather like the monitoring charm, only… well, I think there's three dozen wards designed to monitor an area, each one aimed at something specific. Like, if you look here, you can see representations of Roth, Reyes, Alex, and Jonah, while if I pull down _here_ , we can see where our bodies are."

As she spoke, Sam gestured, which blew up the image of the Shanty Town until we were looking at the small courtyard in front of the shrine we had entered. In the courtyard, was a full color representation of our companions, and if it was in real time then Reyes looked about ready to rip Alex a new one. Though, they seemed to be moving in slow motion. Then, before I could comment on it, Sam had made another gesture, and I could see more representations of the three of us sitting cross-legged in front of the two statues Harry had just tampered with.

"Um, before we move on, why did it look like Reyes was moving in slow motion?" I asked, once I had a chance to speak.

"Hmm?" Sam wondered, before she motioned again, bringing us back up to look at our friends. "Huh… I swear, the ward is telling me this is real time."

"Oh, it is." Harry agreed. "However, working in a mindscape drastically increases processing power, and speed. Our brains are actually working about ten times faster than normal right now. So, while this representation is in real time, we're simply moving fast enough mentally that it _looks_ like it's not."

"Isn't it straining for the human mind to work so hard and fast?" I questioned, sure that I'd heard of something relating to that.

"After about six hours." Harry shrugged. "Trust me, six hours out there would equate out to… three months… So, it actually takes four minutes in the real world for one day to pass in here."

Sam and I stared at Harry.

"Whatever," Sam said, shaking her head. "So, yeah, one of the wards targets the geography, which is why we have such perfect details of the hills, mountains, and valley. Another one targets water, hence why we can see the river and water falls so well. There's one for humans, one for witches and wizards, there's one for accidental magic, there's one for unfocused magic, one for focused magic, there's a ward for animal detection, one for animal repelling, keyed to wolves, and there's an animal attraction ward, keyed to chickens, pigs, cattle, horses, and… ducks. There's an entirely separate ward keyed to deer, which directs them to _this_ area. There's a ward that blocks UV rays, there's a preservation ward, there's a ward designed to keep certain fires burning forever, and another one that prevents flames from spreading outside of those certain fires… Oh, there's one that prevents rust on blades… That's weird, there's a fertility ward here… Oh, it's for the animals. Um… Oh! There's one for humans too… Did _not_ need to know that…"

"Sam…" Harry said leadingly, drawing the girl from her ramblings.

"Yes?" she said.

"Is there a way for you to create some sort of control interface for the wards you now control?" he asked, gesturing to the map.

"Oh!" Sam jumped, looking back at the map as well. "Yeah, cause that's what we're here for! Okay, okay, controls, controls…"

"Sam, have it display active and passive wards as two separate columns." I said, stepping closer to her. "And have them do it in their native kanji, I'll translate from there, and then you can change them based on my translation to something you can understand with a glance."

"Good idea, Lara." Harry said.

"Right." Sam agreed. "Controls."

And right in front of her bloomed a holographic screen, filling with more and more kanji.

"Right." I sighed, stepping closer. "Let's get this done."

.

While Lara translated, and Sam worked on renaming the wards, and setting them how she wanted, I examined the projection of the Shanty Town, and the surrounding valley and mountains. Interestingly enough, the Palace wasn't a part of the projection, despite the fact that it sat on a scalped mountain pretty much in the center of the valley, practically on top of the Shanty Town.

It must have its own ward relay point that we'll have to go back and find. That should be fun.

Using the same movements that Sam had earlier, I expanded certain parts of the Shanty Town, finding more than a few objects that I'm sure Lara would love to look at. Intriguingly, there was a steel foundry in a rather large cave behind the windmill. It was active, but there didn't seem to be any metal in any of the enormous buckets, or whatever they're actually called, that sat on some powerful fires. I marked that in my own mind, sure that a steel foundry would find some use, once we'd gotten rid of all the Storm Guard and the Solarii.

While I had partitioned off this section of the wards from Himiko using the blood magic transference ritual, she was still railing against the change in control. I knew she would, so I threw up another ward, so to speak. Though, it was, admittedly, an odd bit of magic. It essentially redirected Himiko's incessant bids to regain control of the ward relay point onto my own mental shields. It was annoying, more than anything, and it made me realize something. Himiko's soul is a bit more tenuously tied to the mortal world than I'd originally thought.

Which is good.

I just wondered how desperate we were making her now. The total loss of her Storm Guard, (hopefully) the near gutting of the Solarii, and now the loss of control over a portion of the island she'd been ruling for nearly five thousand years _had_ to be pushing her to desperation.

The problem with that, though, was the fact that I didn't know a damned thing about Himiko, outside of the history that the Japanese MOM had given me. If this was Voldemort I was dealing with, I would know how he would respond to desperation, due to my knowledge of his past, and his motivations for what he does. With Himiko though? I don't know what her childhood was like. What she did in her formative years, where she learned magic, or how. Where she'd been before settling on Yamatai, how she took it over or why, hell, I didn't even know where her coven came from, or why she killed them, outside of my suppositions on possible reasons. Worse, I couldn't even predict what spending thousands of years in a single body would do to a person's mind, nevermind the fact that she was probably _alone_ for most of it! Though, to be fair, the single body thing was only if I was correct about her jumping bodies in the first place.

Overall, I'd have to start playing this even more carefully.

This is turning into more of a shit show than I had originally planned.

.

It took almost two full days for Sam and I to go through all of the wards that were emplaced on the Shanty Town Valley, as we came to name it. Of course, those two days equaled out to only eight minutes in the real world, but the list of wards was… extensive, to put it lightly. And because of how extensive the wards were, it meant that the kanji was quite extensive as well.

So extensive, in fact, that Harry was forced to take me into my own mindscape so that I could retrieve my knowledge of kanji.

My mind palace was… weird. And frightening. Very, _very_ frightening.

For the most part, my mind palace seemed to consist of the Croft Manor in the state that I remembered it before… before my father killed himself. I had even seen a vague impression of Winston escorting a younger version of myself down towards the Main Hall.

.

" _Was that… me?" I asked, trying to figure out just what was going on in my mind._

" _You and some older gentleman." Harry agreed next to me. Though, his voice sounded tense. "Lara, where would you keep your knowledge of kanji, in here?"_

" _The library." I shrugged, taking in where I was. Oh. My childhood room. Or rather, just outside of it. "Come on, library's this way."_

 _With that, I turned and began making my way after the image of Winston and my younger self._

" _Technically, there's three wings to the Manor." I said, the memories of Winston teaching me of the history of my own house coming back to me in a rush. "The East, the West, and the North, and, I suppose, the Main Hall could arguably be called the South Wing. It's where the entrance is, or rather, the main entrance, since you can get outside from multiple places in each Wing. The North Wing was also called the Nursery, since it's where the Croft children lived until they came into the Lord or Lady-ship."_

" _Lord or Lady-ship?" Harry cut in sharply, and I turned to him just as I passed through the door into the Main Hall._

" _Yes." I nodded, frowning as I thought about it. "The Croft Family is a Family of the Realm. Nobility. Not that it matters anymore, what with my father ruining the family name with his insane ramblings on the immortal soul, and then killing himself when I was a little girl."_

" _Lara, stop." Harry said, grabbing my shoulder before jerking it. I whirled around, surprised by the force that he'd put into it. "Lara, you're nobility, correct?"_

"… _Yes…?" I questioned. "What about it?"_

 _He frowned._

" _Nevermind," He said after a moment. "How old were you when your father died?"_

"… _I was eleven." I admitted, right before I turned to look at the entrance. Or rather, at the image of Winston standing over a young version of me, who seemed to be doing… something…_

" _Lara." Harry said softly. "We'll talk more about things later, but for now, we need you to get your knowledge of kanji."_

 _I took a deep breath before blowing it out._

" _Yeah." I agreed. "Let's go. This way."_

 _And with that, I turned and made my way to the East Wing's door. I pushed it open, and –_

" _Lara, you're late for your shift!" Declan yelled over the chatter of the patrons in the Nine Bells._

" _Sorry Declan!" I responded without thinking. "Traffic was horrible, and my phone's dead!"_

" _Fine, you're closing tonight then!" the London-born Irishman boomed with laughter._

" _Whatever." I muttered under my breath._

 _With that, I moved towards the bar, slipping behind it with the ease of long practice, and began pulling out the various cups and shakers I'd need to mix drinks._

 _I don't know how long I was there, serving drinks and snacks to the usual crowd of patrons in the Nine Bells, however, I was startled when someone snapped their fingers in my face._

" _Harry?" I asked, wondering what he was doing here. "What-?"_

" _Lara, we need to go." Harry said, before he flicked my forehead._

 _In a rush, everything came back to me._

" _Your mind isn't settled yet." He explained, grabbing me by the upper arm and steering me towards the back door of the bar room, something I'd been unexplainably avoiding until now. "As such, things are dangerous. I just spent four hours trying to navigate London outside of here. We need to go."_

" _A-a-alright." I stuttered, wondering how I had forgotten what I was supposed to be doing here._

 _And then Harry slammed us through the staff door of the Nine Bells, and I was suddenly standing in the East Wing hallway, Harry holding onto my arm still._

" _You're going to be working on your mind palace for quite a while." Harry said sternly, and I couldn't help but nod along._

 _BANG!_

 _I jumped, and I felt Harry twitch beside me._

" _Daddy?"_

 _I whirled around, just in time to see my eleven year old self, elbows and knees scuffed, arms and legs scratched, and a couple nails torn. She ran right past us, barging into my father's office, the repeated calls for my father like daggers in my chest._

 _Then the crying and wailing began._

" _The library." Harry said, voice stern but soft all the same, and I nodded before hesitantly moving closer to my father's office, only to be stopped by Harry._

" _Library." He repeated._

" _It's through the door on the right, right in front of my father's office." I explained, beginning to feel rather hollow._

 _Harry was silent for a moment, and then he gently began to lead me forward, keeping close to the wall as he did so. When we got to the doorway, he threw it open, and we stepped through –_

 _Into the flat I shared with Sam._

"… _Yeah,_ lots _of meditation once we're done here." Harry said dryly next to me._

" _OOOH YEAH!"_

 _I couldn't help but blush._

" _And that's Sam with… someone." I said._

" _And where would the exit be?" Harry asked._

" _Let's hope it's the door to my room." I said, quickly walking towards said doorway._

 _Opening the door and walking through left me… in my flat room._

" _Oh, please don't do this." I mumbled, hurrying towards my cupboard door. Yanking it open, I was disappointed to see the few slinky dresses Sam had forced me to buy, along with some of my more formal blouses and trousers, but no pathway back to my mental representation of Croft Manor. I even stepped inside my cupboard to make sure, but no, it was exactly as it appeared._

 _Whirling around, I flew towards the bathroom, throwing that door open and stepping inside as well. In a bit of a panic now, I flew through the flat, throwing open and stepping through every door and doorway, until finally, Harry and I were left staring at the one door I hadn't pulled open yet._

" _I have to admit, this is rather amusing." Harry chuckled next to me._

" _My mind hates me." I groaned, burying my face in my hands._

" _Well, let's get it over with, shall we?"_

 _I sighed, before dropping my hands to open the door to Sam's room._

 _The entire time I'd been panicking, the moaning and sounds of flesh slapping flesh had not abated, ringing throughout the flat, and I felt mortified that, of all my memories associated with this place,_ this _was the memory my mind was clinging to and using to solidify a mental projection of._

 _When I opened the door to Sam's room, I quickly stepped through, only to feel disappointment when it didn't transport me back to Croft manor. Avoiding looking at Sam's bed, I moved as fast as I could over to her cupboard, yanking open the door, and stepping through._

 _I sighed in relief, as I was suddenly standing on the upper landing of the Croft Family Library, Harry standing next to me._

" _That was_ so _embarrassing." I muttered, only to… squeak, when Harry threw an arm around my shoulders._

" _Better than walking in on my two best friends, let me tell you." He laughed. "Trust me, we couldn't look each other in the face for almost a month."_

" _Not helping." I growled, shaking his arm off before stalking up to the railing. "_ Accio _knowledge of ancient kanji."_

 _With a bang, a clatter, and a whoosh of air, a two foot tall, one foot wide, and four foot deep tome flew at my face._

"… _Ow…" I groaned. Harry was laughing uproariously above me as I struggled to sit up, the tome in question weighing down my upper body. "I didn't know that I knew so much."_

" _Come on now, Ms. Croft." Harry chuckled, wiping away some tears. "We've got a job to do still."_

"… _Help?" I asked after a moment of ineffective struggling._

"… _Oh, all right." He huffed in amusement. "The best way to do these things–"_

 _He pressed down on the top cover of the book, and instead of it crushing me with his added weight, the book compressed, much like… an accordion._

" _Is to make them smaller."_

 _Then he picked up the book, which now seemed to be about as thin as an iPad, and folded it in half._

" _And the best way to do that…"_

 _He folded it again._

" _Is to just–"_

 _Another fold._

" _Keep–"_

 _And another fold._

" _Folding."_

 _And another one, leaving the formerly enormous book no larger than the notebook I kept in my shirt pockets on the expected busy nights at the Nine Bells._

" _Ta-da." He smiled, holding the now tiny book out to me._

" _I hope this is something I can do outside of my mind." I grumped, snatching the book out of his hands and stuffing it into my pocket._

" _Well, let's get back to Sam's mind." Harry said, still smirking at me._

" _Oh, please don't tell me we're going back the way we came!" I begged._

" _Of course not." Harry laughed. "Let's go."_

 _And as soon as he put his hand on my shoulder, a flash of light overtook my vision._

" _What took you guys so long?"_

.

After telling Sam the barebones path that we'd had to take through my own mind, we'd gotten to work going through all the wards.

When we were done, Harry had dragged us back out of Sam's mind, and back into our own bodies.

"Wow, that's weird." Sam said next to me, shaking her head. "Maybe having a HUD in my vision wasn't the best idea."

"HUD?" I asked.

"Heads-Up Display." Sam explained. "I've got the important wards set up to show me their status. I originally made them semi-transparent, but I think I'm going to change that next time I meditate."

"You're both going to be meditating once we get back to camp." Harry interrupted, clambering back down to the floor of the shrine chamber. "Sorting out your memories, cleaning up your mind palaces, organizing things. That's what the both of you are going to be focusing on for a little while.

"Yes, master." We chorused.

When we got back up to the camp, we gave everyone the story of the shrine, right before Harry took Sam back down into the underground shrine. I wanted to go with them, but Harry told me to stay and meditate, and work on my mind palace. I complied, though I wasn't necessarily happy about it.

The lull that ensued would make me wish for it later.


	18. Author's Note

**Hello there, all my faithful followers and readers. This is not me saying Master of the Tomb Raider is over, it's simply me letting you know I have had to back away from it. Thankfully, my muse is still going, and as a result, I have started a new fanfic, The Deathless Quirk. It's an SI/OC taking place in the My Hero Academia universe. Please take a look at it and let me know what you think of it!**


End file.
